Why we revert to original titles
There is an ongoing trickle of complaints about this, as if we were engaged in some sort of sinister conspiracy.
Titles on HN are not self-expression the way comments are. Titles are common property. The person who happens to submit something first shouldn't thereby get the right to choose the title for everyone else. This would be clearer if we didn't let submitters enter a title-- if our software simply let people submit urls, and retrieved the title from the page. We don't do this because it's too inflexible. Some articles have titles that are too long. In others the subtitle makes a better title. But the fact that a title field is editable doesn't make it comment.
It's true that when submitters change titles, their new titles often contain more information than the article's original title. But a significant percentage of the extra information added in this way is false. The only way we can tell if a newly created title is accurate is to read the article, and we're not about to read every article submitted to HN. The only option is to revert to the original title, which is at least what the author intended.
(We do sometimes change titles from the original when the original title is egregious linkbait, or false. We have also, since the beginning when our users were largely YC alumni, put e.g. (YC S13) after the names of YC companies in titles. But these are not the types of changes users mean when they complain about moderators changing titles.)
If we had infinite attention to spend on moderation, we could read every article and decide whether each user-created title was better than the original title. But we don't. Moderating HN is no one's full time job. And frankly it's not that big a deal anyway. If we're going to expend cycles trying to fix something about HN, the increasing prevalence of mean and stupid comments has a much higher priority than the fact that authors' original titles are not maximally informative.
230 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadHow do I make a link in a question?
You can't. (This is to prevent people from using this method as a way of submitting a link, but with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.)
Then every bland default post title requires a visit to the post page to read the extra detail.
Not completely unreasonable, but not an good UX pattern either.
Gives me an idea for a Greasemonkey script I'll never actually write: fetch the first comment for a post and make it visible when mousing over the title on the list of posted stories.
I suppose you could have a separate "subtitle" field that anyone can add to, and vote the best/worst like comments, but that seems like more trouble than it's worth.
Has it been considered having a subtitle showing [previously titled: xxx] or some such when a title is edited?
Or possibly relying on a flagging feature along the lines of "misleading or editorialized title"? Rather than just changing all/most titles?
The only reason I typically care about this conversation is that a year ago or so I was tracking an article that I saw the "new" page, and it got its title changed to something insanely literal like "Post #4". Which of course tanked it's chance of getting off the new page and me learning anything about the topic.
Either of your suggestions would have solved this problem.
This approach gives intelligent first posters the necessary flexibility to change the title for any of many valid reasons (I still can't believe your comment that they changed the title of that serial killer article, killing one of the most chillingly powerful articles of the last month), yet it prevents first posters from abusing their priority even more effectively than the current approach.
I mean people aren't stupid enough to change the Title of the "Higgs Boson" to "Bananas". Sorry, if this comes over wrong. I respect you and this is just critics on your software's policies.
Maybe keep the submission title as a title attribute on the href? I have no idea what that does to SEO (or if anyone cares).
How many articles reach the front page per day? I'd imagine it is a small percentage of the total
scenario 1: content w/editorialized [sensational] title -> front page -> title correction -> content on front page still
scenario 2: content w/author's [uninformative] title -> never reaches front page -> never gets reviewed
I think my problem is that when a headline is clearly too vague and someone adds a non adjectivey headline, the mods go out of their way to revert it, doing a disservice to everyone. If monitoring titles is a burden, then it seems like it'd be less work in these cases to leave the clarified titles...the community is usually good about flagging it.
Also, do HN mods revert to headline or the title tag? That is, can submitters choose from either (this is significant for most New Yorker articles, which have very short heds by properly descriptive title tags)
I guess I could try to adopt a personal policy of only reading submissions that have vague, out-of-context titles, and see if it works as a kind of reverse heuristic.
Give a small number of trusted users a "mega downvote" - it takes a comment to -2 with a single click.
(Just for clarity: I don't want this button. I'd be a terrible person to give it to.)
The problem is you've created a horrible half way house. There is a class of submissions that only make sense or attract interest with a custom title. These generally get reverted to some meaningless title which then prompts a lot of pointless discussion about the title change. If you don't have the man power to review custom titles, and don't trust the community to do it then disallow them other than in the case of manually editing down titles that are too long. It means missing out on a certain class of submissions, but those are mostly a mess these days anyway because they get filled with people talking about the automatic title change and people confused about why the link was submitted and upvoted.
Horrible might be a little strong. "Mildly confusing," or, "suboptimal in certain respects" are more accurate.
:D
And 'running it free' is not like they are doing us a favour like you make it out to be, but running it right, is.
And we all know you are one of the good admins here too :) /s
Unfortunately, that policy engages with an issue that nerds can debate endlessly --- which title is better? What constitutes editorializing? Are original author titles the optimal titles? Oh, look, there's that word "optimal" --- let's spend seventeen weeks debating it!
Therefore, it seems like there's something for us to discuss. But there really isn't a discussion to be had here. People who want titles to be managed should start their own HN alternatives. We could use more of them. Or, even simpler: if you have a story with a bad title and a new title you feel strongly about, instead of submitting and then writing a long comment, write a blog post about the story and submit that instead.
Of course, those two suggestions are much less fun to talk about than a debate about titling stories.
A long comment and a link are probably OK, but if you just want to change the title, you'd probably get accused of blogspam.
This has the advantage of getting the right title, getting out a link to the article, and having a quick synopsis of why the title change was made in the first place.
Well, actually, the guidelines ask us to submit the original. But you can submit the original and link to your blog in the comments.
The point is- the title isn't important enough to worry about- content is.
Titles are how I decide which articles to read, and often the original title doesn't explain why the article should/might be considered interesting by the HN audience.
Actually, the problem is that they have a recently changed[1] policy that makes no sense whatsoever given the limitations on this site with relation to the nature of media that's being posted. I.e. the fact that submitters cannot post a title and a lede, while the lede on a linked site may add much needed context to an otherwise ambiguous title.
Unfortunately, your head is so far up pg's ass that you were unable to realize this simple fact.
Therefore, you may continue massaging pg's balls.
[1] As recently as last year, this was the policy: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."
HN has been around for a while, so many long-time users probably aren't even aware of the change.
As stated elsewhere in this thread by others in replies to your suggestion (but sadly much lower on this page, so people will continue to see this earlier comment of yours): short blog posts telling people about another post are generally considered "blogspam" and so thereby posting anything but the original article is not just widely disliked on this site but explicitly violates the guidelines.
"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.".
Between submitting retitled blog spam with commentary and editorializing the title of the original source, I believe the former is a lesser evil.
Users can upvote the original source when it is submitted with the original title, while the blog spam falls off of newest. (In the unlikely case that the blog spam has a better title, it will get upvotes as you'd normally expect.)
Right now, this editorializing of titles puts a lot of burden on the moderators, and I think that any solution to this issue that we come up with that has to deal with the finite bandwidth of those moderators.
A Farewell --- Android head quits
Regardless, I take issue with your contention and seemingly fundamental assumption that the article's original title is somehow better and will win out against alternative titles. The entire reason people get angry about this is that the alternative titles are often much more useful: they are more precise, and they are even sometimes less sensationalized.
Sometimes titles just need to be different when the material is being viewed in a different context. I've actually been chewed out before for "editorializing the title" when I wrote the original article in a case where my original didn't even have a title because the medium (Google+) doesn't use them. In other cases, the in-context title might need to be very short, but on Hacker News it should be longer.
The places you thereby see users actually complaining about this policy are not the places where the submitted title sucked. To demonstrate just how dismissive it is to claim that that is the situation we are discussing: it's like trying to end a debate on whether airport security should strip search anyone who talks about security issues because clearly everyone who does so is a dangerous terrorist.
In fact, even people (such as myself) who complain about title changes made on Hacker News often call for title changes, as to many of us the problem is "inaccuracy", not "originality": if the title says something that doesn't seem to be true (as in the case just yesterday regarding the Tesla S's usage of rare earth metals) it isn't the person submitting the link that is "editorializing", it is the original author.
Another interesting circumstance was one of the original cases from about a year ago that made this turn into a big public argument: the visualization on the New York Times about some non-hacker aspect of politics. The visualization was insanely impressive, and someone wanted to submit the visualization. The title was clear, factual, and even quite concise: it just labeled the page as being a visualization.
In this case, there were tons of interesting comments about the visualization, and people were really excited to see it: the link was clearly a success, it was voted to the front page, and not a single person was bothered that it was there... until some moderator changed the title to the original title of the visualization, which was about some political issue, and now the comments changed in tone.
Now, people were arguing about how this wasn't worthy of being on Hacker News: that political issues should be discussed elsewhere; then a fight breaks out about the underlying politics. People are infuriated that somehow this link ended up on the front page with an insane number of votes, and no one has any context due to the policy of changing the titles of posts, even after many hours of discussion in hundreds of comments, without any historical notice that it happened.
This is the kind of situation that I think it is reasonable to be bothered by; sure, there are some people who believe that the titles should never be changed under any circumstance, and to the extent to which they exist it is convenient to lump them together with everyone else because "well, people editorialize and there's linkbait so the titles should be changed QED"; but that's not the argument that I've actually seen about title changes: people just want more nuance and more transparency.
I can totally see someone submitting a HN page talking about the visualization in the NYT to some meta-HN. (I was going to remark about reddit.com submissions, but most of the top ones seem to be submissions where reddit.com was the original source.)
I suspect that "more transparency" won't happen if it results in more work for the moderators; I'd vastly prefer solutions which are self-reinforcing and can come about by the community working together within the existing framework of HN.
Upvoted to the front page, holding there for hours, people were having a discussion about the appropriateness of swearing in this context, the extent to which it was a joke, and about how NVIDIA has treated the Linux community. And, of course, then the title changed: it got reverted to something like "Random Panel from Random Conference".
Now, everyone was really confused: the comments were all concentrating on this one moment in an hour long video (linked to semi-directly, but still like 30 seconds after the link), and freaking out about how people were so uptight and shouldn't be concentrating on that, and that there was all of this other content there.
When the title changes, it drastically changes the character of the discussion: while this website is also a link aggregator, I know of very few people who believe that that is its value; instead, people like Hacker News because of the comments: it is a discussion forum. You can't just change the title of the discussion forum while people are actively discussing things without causing a catastrophic situation.
This is thereby what I mean by "transparency": I don't mean a moderator spending even an extra 30 seconds explaining "why" something happened... I just mean that the site needs to make it clear that something did happen, or these massive arguments break out and a bunch of people are left unhappy and angry. As long as title changes are going to happen to discussion threads that already have hundreds of comments, you at least need to have a boolean "title changed" notice.
That aside, the "nuance" aspect (which I think is even more important than the "transparency" part, as you might just decide "old posts should never have their title changed" and the transparency is less important) would probably require more time from the moderators. I am not certain how to get around that: I think moderation fundamentally requires nuance.
There just need to be enough watchdogs.
A very simple solution would be that titles can be flagged by the community. Example below:
Moderators would simply edit flagged bad titles. Rather than having them to watch all titles (old rules) or no titles at all (new rules).Wikipedia has enormous meta community, and it's likely that such a huge amount of meta is toxic.
That's up to the admins to decide what needs more often to be managed, the submission or the discussion. Or it could be named:
So this is less "Hey PG, could you wash my dishes and do my laundry" and more "Hey PG, could you please stop loading up my dishwasher with dirty socks?" The labor is already being done, but at least one of the people doing it seems to be doing it in cases where it is detrimental.
It's more like PG agreeing to do your laundry, but under the condition that he will put all colors together, regardless of your wishes, instructions or special sorting of laundry before you give it to him. He's willing to do some work for you, just not as much as you would like. It may even seem like he does more work, when clothes that were pre-sorted into single load sized chunks end up mixed together, but that's his process. If you want sorted laundry, use a different service.
I guess what I should be saying is that this laundry service is ripe for disruption by a more flexible newcomer. But I wouldn't say that, because that would be a low, cheap joke that would prevent me from looking too long at myself in the mirror.
My issue is with the HN moderator[s] who are not using common sense while executing this policy. When an informative title gets changed to an information-free title, it is detrimental to the site. The point of using moderators to do this instead of auto-reverting all titles is so that the moderators can use some judgement. That is great, so long as they actually do that.
Worse, you then tack on hypothetical (and frankly ridiculous) extensions like making coffee or doing laundry (both are personal tasks with no relevance to the HN community).
I'd like to believe the community is mature enough to debate this issue without having to be subtly threatened with PG's authority.
To my mind a truncated page title taken from the page itself along with a subtitle provided by the submitter and optionally a user selected number of lines from the submission content itself would provided a more useful and informative page for triaging content one wishes to consume/discuss.
However it seems that moderation of titles isn't working so simply reverting to using the given page title created by the content creator is probably the best immediate option.
IMO a site like HN should be highly customisable. If I want page titles and you want the submitters titles and someone else wants only the head lines from the submitters content then why not. If you want votes hidden and I want them visible, why not. If you want votes weighted by longevity of the user and I want votes weighted by people I've upvoted, why not.
But that's not HN and primarily it's the corpus of people here rather than the site that generate the worth.
But then the top comment on such submissions end up being [Original]: <link>
So it just might work.
In that sense it's a compliment to PG and the admins that people get so worked up about things like this; it shows they've built something people care about.
When a person pastes URL into box, how hard can it be to follow that URL and parse original title? This way people won't even have to input more fields.
This would hopefully decrease the number of edited titles as they would be more effort to enter - and would let the mods revert them with the click of a button as they could compare titles without reading articles.
Consider this title:
In the context of the PHP blog, it might indicate a change of direction of the project, a change of leadership, etc. It's a decently sensible title. On a social aggregator like HN, it is much less useful, even if printed next to a small (php.net).We'd be better off if we let the submitted change it to:
For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573101 is on the front page right now.
The title is:
Modeling your App's User Session (github.com)
It's a blog post by Github staff about how they're now tracking user sessions with Rails, cookies, and their DB. Unfortunately, due to the way that the Github site is structured, from the title, one might think that this is a link to a library repo for user session tracking on a mobile app. A small change to the title, like "Github's modeling of user sessions" would convey the meaning of the blog post much better than the title.
Being right or wrong about dismissing a bad example doesn't matter. The important thing is to fix the example and then evaluate it.
I guess I have a problem with jumping on someone who was correct.
Perhaps a way to get around the ambiguity (at least in case of github) would be to encourage people to use/link to gh-pages (so we see github.io as distinct from github.com) when they are available?
Here's a recent one from memory:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492781
The originally supplied title was something similar to: "My afternoon with a serial killer". It was changed to the "Center of the Universe" title.
Clicking a link titled "Center of the Universe" one would rationally think they were about to read something by an astronomer regarding the latest hubble deep space image.
Anyway, re-titling horribly editorialized posts is fine. The problem is that the person/people doing it seem to exercise little to no discretion when doing it.
For example a few days ago there was a submission with the title "Beer". Since i am interested in beer I clicked on it. But instead of something interesting about beer I got a piece of alcohol fueled drama in the Ruby community which I am totally not interested in.
By leaving the original title I almost always have to click on all articles on the frontpage to find the 4 or 5 articles I am interested in.
Perhaps we should get rid of the complete title to make it as unbiased as possible? Just put the number 1 to 30 on a page and link them to the articles and hide the domain via javascript. This way you prevent a lot of problems... For me almost nothing would change because I already have to click on almost all the links just to figure out what's in the article and if i am interested in it.
If a custom title is submitted, require an explanation. Possibly display both the custom title and the original title.
I'm not thinking blink tag gaudy :) - but seeing an "unmissable" reminder message as you are typing your comment into the textarea would probably be helpful in curbing abuses.
I do realize we don't see many articles from HuffPo on here, just putting this info out there. http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/how-the-huffington-post-use...
Either stick with this strategy or do what Digg.com is doing these days; a main title and the little subtext thing that they almost always use for a one-liner joke, but sometimes for serious commentary/secondary-title.