HN Explorer

Tell HN: HN Auto Removes “Blazingly” from Titles

7 points by bitforger ↗ HN
If you submit a post titled "X is Blazingly Y", HN will automatically change that title to "X is Y".

Doesn't that seem a little odd? I can understand wanting to limit buzzword / clickbait titles, but isn't the word "blazingly" sometimes justified in context?

16 comments

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slater
Other words are also justified in context. Too bad the SEO goblins ruined it for us.
swayvil
I'd love to see the "forbidden word list". Is that posted somewhere?
bitforger
I also just tested "X is Really Y" and the same thing happened. We could probably enumerate the adverbs and get a good sense of what the list looks like, if you're not afraid of getting banned :3
swayvil
I wonder why the forbidden word list is secret. Surely not just for spammer combat.
codingdave
Except that it is in your title, so clearly is it not just a blanket removal. There must be some logic checking whether it materially adds value to the title, and removes it if not. Even if that logic is simply checking for spaces and you got around it with quotes, that is some level of thought put into it. This seems in line with the general vibe of HN and its moderation. I can see that yes, there may be some exceptions where the word would be appropriate, but that is the edge case - automating the more general rule seems reasonable to me.
yesenadam
> it is in your title, clearly is it not just a blanket removal. There must be some logic checking whether it materially adds value to the title, and removes it if not.

Uh that seems wrong. When HN auto-changes submission titles, you can just manually edit them back to how they were.

disadvantage
When HN automatically omits certain words in a submission, I click 'edit' and put the words back in. This strangely works, but not many people know you can do that.
eimrine
Remains a "reveal bullshit" script which replaces some words on a webpage with a "bullshit" one. BTW this word does not even in a list of a those script.

Also sometimes HN changes titles to get each meaningful word capitalized.

bilsbie
That is strange. If it’s editing titles you’d think it could do a lot more useful stuff.

Off the top of my head:

Remove the names of publishers since it doesn’t add anything

Remove the words “why” and “how”

Correct the usage of “affect” and “effect”

Detect if a title references itself in an infinite loop

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Jtsummers
"Why..." and "How..." titles are edited to remove those words. That's been the case for years. The submitter gets a 2 hour or so window to edit the title if they don't like the changes.
bilsbie
How about my other ideas?
rotifer
So much for post I wanted to submit about the blazingly ergonomic library I've written...
zzo38computer
Removing the word "Blazingly" is no good if it describes something whose name is "Blazingly".

In one case, it changed "1st" to "first" (after I had made from "first" to "1st" because the original title was two characters longer than the limit) and then it complained that it was over the limit.

yuppie_scum
HN and the web in general could do with a lot fewer adverbs