When you work in the media, you may work for your boss, but you report to algorithms.

If you're a writer, you have many bosses on top of your CEO or director or whatever: Google, Facebook, and so on.

It's the name of the game.

I started writing a very long time ago, and I've been doing it professionally for eight years, by which I mean for the last eight years, this has been my only job and source of income.

There are a few things I've learnt. I learnt some of these things organically, and I've learnt other things because the people whose job is to stay on top of algorithms told me so.

• Headline capitalisation 

In the past, people would always capitalise every word with few exceptions (articles, adverbs, etcs). This, luckily, is no longer a thing.

Some publications still do that, but most stopped. The truth is all caps titles look clunky and naff. It's a thing of the past, let's leave it in the past.

• Clickbait doesn't work anymore

Clickbait, especially if it's excessive, doesn't really work anymore. There are two reasons for this. First, people are becoming privy to it. It no longer works because readers have learnt the hard way that clickbait headlines often lead to disappointing content.

Second, Google (and other platforms that use algorithms) are downgrading. If your HL is too clickbait-y, Google will likely pick it up and be like, "Nope. Bad content. Pass."

• Stop saying 'insane' or 'crazy' or 'wild'

Like so many other things, using 'insane', 'crazy', 'wild' or other exaggerations doesn't work anymore simply because it's overused.

If everything's 'insane', then nothing's insane.

10 or 20 years ago, writers (usually) used to use insane to describe things that were genuinely shocking.

Now, everybody's using it for everything. Here's a practical example. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong spent $6.2 million on personal security last year. Some publications called that 'insane' or 'crazy'. Is it really insane? Really? People spend millions on sim cards or custom license plates. Justin Sun paid millions for a banana.

So the CEO of a company that manages hundreds of billions of dollars, whose personal net worth is well north of $10 billion, spending seven figures on making sure he's always safe when travelling from A to B or when he's home actually a bargain. It's logical, it's expected. Not insane.

• There's no 'I' unless you have a bankable name

I use the first person all the time here because we're basically among friends and this is informal but, when I write for my company I never do. And as a professional writer you should never use the first person.

Why? Because, with exceptions, people know your company, but they don't know you. When you're writing for a major publication, people are reading your words because you're writing for that specific publication, not because of your writing.

More to the point. They don't care about what 'you' think. They may care about what the publication you're representing thinks, but not about you.

In other words, if Jamie Dimon, Brian Armstrong, Michael Saylor, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, etc. are writing an article, say, for Forbes, then they can write in first person.

This is because their name is bankable. People know who they are. They have opinions on them. So the first person makes sense, even if you, the reader, hate that particular person. Or you may love them. That's irrelevant. But you know who they are.

But staff writers? Nah.

• Leave your thesaurus at home, please

This is true in every language but especially true in English, a language with a vast vocabulary, but with speakers who generally only use a small portion of that in the real world.

Here's an example. These are some of the available synonyms for the word(s) home/house: homestead, habitation, residence, dwelling, abode, domicile, quarters, lodgings, pad, digs.

Say you don't want to use home or house. You can use pad and digs, informally and especially if your audience is American.

You can use residence, in certain contexts.

If we really wanted to stretch it, we could use abode, especially in the context of the expression 'humble abode', especially if used ironically, and we could say quarters in a military context.

But other words? No one says homestead, habitation, dwelling, domicile, lodgings in the real world. If you're at the pub and tell your friends - unironically - you have to go back to your habitation they'll start laughing.

So if we wouldn't use in a real-world conversation, why would use it in writing?

I'm curious to know more about points and comments you'd add to the list, let me know in the comments.