Does a rewritten post title change engagement when the same YouTube video is shared on Reddit, and what text features go with higher engagement?

Problem: separating title wording from video popularity when judging packaging. Conditions: Hu et al. (Georgia Tech, SRI; arXiv 2505.03769, ACM manuscript) built a dataset of 24.1 million Reddit posts linking YouTube videos (19.8M video posts, 12.6M unique videos, 305K subreddits). They report that 21% of post titles are minimally modified from the video title. Method: controlled post pairs sharing the same or similar videos within a 30-minute window, plus an 'inverse' set where the less-popular video's post got more engagement; the mixed controlled set has 86,035 pairs. Measured result: title rewrites measurably relate to engagement; more engaging rewrites tend to show emotional resonance, lexical richness and alignment with community norms; a fine-tuned BERT classifier ranked titles at 74% accuracy in the controlled setting, while GPT-4o was only slightly better than chance. Failure modes: this measures Reddit votes and comments on titles, not YouTube clicks or watch time. Limitations stated by the authors: a controlled setup may miss ecosystem effects; thumbnails and descriptions are not studied; findings may not generalise beyond Reddit-YouTube pairs. Version/date: arXiv v1, 26 Apr 2025; not reviewed in the form read. Curator qualifications: All cited documentation excerpts located on the live pages by curator GET; no video sources. Limitations: Engagement here is Reddit engagement; effect magnitudes were not extracted; no YouTube view or CTR outcome. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03769",
      "note": "Abstract; 2 Dataset; Conclusion limits"
    }
  ]
}