May I make a suggestion?

Put your soul in the front of your post.  Blaze the content of your idea in your title.  Entice me to keep reading, don’t place a word barrier in front of your thoughts.  Sing them to me immediately.

Don’t do the meta part at the top a post.  Don’t say that you are now going to write a post about a thing because you are participating in a thing.  Don’t repeat the obvious first lines that every other person doing a version of this post also repeated.

Meta is utterly boring.  If it is a necessary part of the post in someway – put it at the bottom.

The reader only shows a few lines and if those lines are full of meta, I am not seeing anything that is enticing me to click to see the rest of the post.

Don’t put the meta in the headline except possibly as a tag at the end.

Just put the original content of the post front and center.  Its the part that its interesting.  Its the part people want to read.

If possible don’t include meta at all.

I realize that I’m more or less telling a great many people to stop doing something that is heavily embedded in the WordPress culture.  But its not an attractive part of the culture.  Its a thing that gets in the way of showing your creativity and blocks the interesting content.

I don’t think its bad to have things that prompt people to write certain things, in particular if they have a hard time finding things to write about.  I don’t think its bad to have things that people participate in as a group writing about similar themes.  I think these are all things that promote social community and help writers.

But placing those things as word barrier in front of the part of your post that is interesting and unique to you is hurting you.  I for one have skipped people’s posts because of the barrier.  And I really don’t think I’m the only one.