
Why I am no longer submitting direct URLs to HN (and neither should you) - lisper
A while back there was a kerfuffle on HN about link headlines being changed by the mods to the original headline on the article being linked to, on the grounds that link submissions are &quot;community property&quot; and so the headlines should not be editorialized.  The problem with this is that more often than not, the original headline sucks.  Such is the case for this article, which is really the content of this submission:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.salon.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;02&#x2F;thanks_for_killing_the_planet_boomers&#x2F;<p>The original headline is, &quot;Thanks for killing the planet, boomers.&quot;  But this is a flip headline that belies the serious and important subject matter, and also obscures the part of the article that IMO is (or at least should be) of major interest to most of the HN audience.  That point is that climate change is a <i>generational</i> issue:<p>&quot;If you’re already in your mid-50s or later, and you’re lucky enough not to reside in any areas that are traditionally prone to hurricanes or flooding, you’ll miss the worst of our imminent destruction. But for those of us who are younger..., who hope to live long, healthy, happy lives — well, tough shit. ... While the AARP spends over $100 million on D.C. lobbyists every year protecting... Social Security and Medicare, no comparable institution exists to lobby on behalf of Mmillennials and “Gen Z,” the demographic groups that will face global warming’s worst consequences. We’ve been consigned to the sidelines, turned into spectators of the greatest disaster movie ever made.&quot;<p>So I am no longer submitting direct links to HN because I believe they are too constraining.  From now on I am only doing text submissions with embedded links and a brief summary of the content and why I think it&#x27;s relevant to HN.  I think that if more people did this, the quality of the content on the home page would be improved.  At least it&#x27;s an experiment worth conducting.
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tptacek
Forget the abusive submission tactic and look at the article itself: far from
being "important" for HN, it's entirely off-topic; less germane even than a
common political article, this Salon piece is a shrill tour of seemingly every
political position Salon endorses, tied together not with a coherent thesis
but rather an overt suggestion that _the world is ending_.

You submit some great stuff, Ron, but I'd like to suggest as respectfully as I
can that we'd all be better off if you took Salon off the list of sites you
submitted from. It's not that there's never anything good on Salon (I got my
favorite caesar salad recipe from Salon!), but the stuff you pull from it
tends towards the (large) divisive, partisan, and unproductive portion of the
Salon spectrum.

~~~
logjam
And _bang_ , in tptacek's comment we have everything that's wrong with Hacker
News comments in a nutshell.

You just decried an article without once pointing out any errors in the
article, then attempted to paint any number of submissions with the same
brush. Nah, the article was just _shrill_ and the only things the site is
useful for is Caesar salad recipes.

Seriously, this kind of commenting is _the reason_ Hacker News has become
known as anything but a hangout for actual hackers - you know, the folks who
use little things like reason and facts and logic in discussion.

~~~
__--__
I would argue your comment is a better example of that kind of commenting.
tptacek gave us an opinion on the topic at hand. You commented solely to
attack him and whine. Which one do you think does more damage to HN?

~~~
l0gicpath
Like your comment whining and attacking him is an even better example of that
kind of commenting, just like my comment here.

We could say that we just filled up useless space on this thread or we could
simply call it a discussion, two individuals exchanging opinions.

~~~
robrown
I commented last! I win!

e: And don't even think of replying.

~~~
britknight
Too late. I thought of it.

------
LoonyPandora
From the guidelines - and I think a much better way of adding commentary &
changing headlines:

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

    
    
      Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add
      commentary to links. The text field is for starting
      discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url
      field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link,
      write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

~~~
kintamanimatt

      If you want to add initial commentary on the link,
      write a blog post about it and submit that instead.
    

This will immediately get flagged as blogspam though.

~~~
buugs
Yes, there was an instance recently where somebody did just that and the link
to the article changed to the original link that was being commented on.

~~~
__--__
That brings up the question: what's considered blogspam and what's considered
good commentary? Is that automated, or is there a judgement made by the
moderators?

------
programminggeek
I use HN a lot, but I just don't think this is that big of a deal. One, if a
link or article doesn't make first page, who cares? If someone doesn't like
the headline you used, so what?

Submit what you want and it will get up/downvoted accordingly. It's not the
end of the world. It's just a social news site.

~~~
mbreese
The problem isn't bad headlines, the problem is changing headlines in a non
transparent manner. It makes the site more difficult to use and overall less
useful.

------
acqq
How about writing a real post in the real blog, referring to the article you
agree to but where you feel the idea is not expressed clearly or appropriately
enough?

~~~
timmaah
HN will then change the url to the actual article bypassing the blog post.

------
bchjam
If you change a link's title, I won't know if I've read the link previously.

Also, crappy headlines are often a sign of crappy writing/content.

~~~
ams6110
And in this case, the signs are correct.

This is just yet another sensational climate change piece on a pop-culture
website. The authors qualifications? _Tim Donovan is a freelance author who
blogs about Millennial issues at The Suffolk Resolves._

At his personal site we learn "In 2006, Tim graduated from Emerson College
with a BFA in Writing." Nothing wrong with that, but it's nothing that gives
him any credibility in a serious discussion of climate change.

------
kanamekun
Unfortunately, I can't click on your embedded link... and it's not easy to cut
and paste links from my mobile device. So if people started doing this, I
would probably just stop clicking on outside links unless I was on my computer
and the link looked extremely interesting.

~~~
lisper
That's odd, HN converts URLs to links in comments, e.g.:

[http://www.salon.com/2013/12/02/thanks_for_killing_the_plane...](http://www.salon.com/2013/12/02/thanks_for_killing_the_planet_boomers/)

It's surprising that it doesn't do so in text submissions.

~~~
agumonkey
It shouldn't be hard to add for pg if HNers asks for it I guess. I agree with
OP's that webpage titles can't be used as-is and a text submission adding
context is better than auto-titled entries.

~~~
tehwebguy
It's not hard to add, it is omitted on purpose

------
steven2012
Honestly, does it really matter if someone reads the articles that you submit
or not? Come on now, stop taking yourself so seriously.

The rules of Hacker News are pretty simple. The articles are submitted with
the titles of the article. Sure, sometimes it doesn't work out well, but most
times it does. And it significantly reduces decision making time for the
moderators, which given their work, is likely much more important than your
vanity of getting karma points.

If you want people to pay attention, why not post it to reddit or some other
forum?

~~~
drcube
> Honestly, does it really matter if someone reads the articles that you
> submit or not?

Why submit it if you think otherwise?

~~~
steven2012
You submit it for fun, in hopes that people read it and that it generates some
discussion. But if no one reads it, then don't have a tantrum. Understand that
a lot of it is luck-based, and in the end, it's not that important.

------
uzero
And all I can hear is George Carlin
[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c)

~~~
rplst8
This x1000. Accept that the planet's climate is changing. Accept that it's
partly our fault. Accept that it's all our fault. Accept that the changes have
a possibility of being catastrophic. Accept that they definitely are
catastrophic. In the end - it doesn't matter. If the planet wants to get rid
of us, it will. And there is little we can do to prevent it. The recent uptick
in antibiotic resistant bacteria is probably the most concerning to me.

Personally I think an extremely virulent disease, another Chicxulub, or a
massive super-volcano eruption are way more likely than us fixing Global
Warming and living here for infinity.

------
namenotrequired
Whenever this issue comes up, usually related to linkbait titles, I feel like
I missed something. The guidelines say:

"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
linkbait."

Doesn't this mean it's OK to make a better title if the original is linkbait?

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
demachina
Might have been a better choice to make your point about headlines to not use
an example that is flame bait and slamming a significant percentage of HN's
readership, pg included. Blaming boomers for everything wrong with this planet
is a little over the top. They are one generation among many.

Earth's likely demise will be the massive increases in fossil fuel use in
places like India and China, and the failure to control population growth in
places like India.

The EPA was created in the 1970's. Its mostly managed to push all the
pollution intensive industries off shore to China and elsewhere.

It was also a serious mistake to carry the Western lifestyle to places with
billions of people largely unmodified.

Any environmental choices made by boomers in the developed world will trail to
insignificance in the face of China and India's choices. India in particular
is the one currently obstructing the Kyoto follow on talks in Warsaw.

------
Codhisattva
Only write meta posts that complain about community rules and slyly use the
article you're trying to promote as an example of how the rule has failed the
community. Win/win.

------
randallsquared
Technical solutions are generally better than workarounds or social solutions
(but, of course, require signoff from pg and/or other maintainers).

Two that I think would be nicer:

Keep both the title the submitter used and the "fixed" title if a mod fixed
it, and allow users to select which they see in preferences (defaulting to
"fixed", with a tooltip of the other one, perhaps).

Keep the title the submitter used, but allow duplicates, and combine the
discussions for duplicates. May the most popular title win.

~~~
hyperpape
I tend to think technical solutions are typically crap. They just happen to
scale better than social solutions.

Say you're learning a new subject. Would you rather have a meticulously
researched guide to articles and books on the subject compiled by an expert
(one who has the good form to link to opposing viewpoints if they exist) or
Google? I'd take the former. But usually I end up with Google because the
search bar is part of my browser.

~~~
saalweachter
If you're old enough and social enough to remember, librarians were the pre-
Internet search engine. While most people only interacted with a librarian to
check in or out a book, their primary function is information retrieval. You
just go up to a librarian, say, "Hey, I'm looking for information about X",
and they come back to you with a hand curated list of books, periodicals, and
other materials which are most likely to answer your questions.

~~~
hyperpape
Old enough to remember, not old enough to have done it outside of school
projects.

------
WaterSponge
Allow for a small subtext under/side of the title submissions that allow some
editorializing to spark discussion. So more is know about the link before
having to click thru.

------
lemcoe9
Are you a good enough journalist/editor/writer to make the evaluation that the
article's title is not appropriate for the content of said article?

~~~
elliottcarlson
It's often pretty clear that the original articles headline is link bait to
begin with, or may not convey the topic properly to a community such as HN.

~~~
officemonkey
"Learn Clojure in 24 hours by following this one weird tip."

------
Houshalter
I love HN's community but don't like a lot of it's policies/design choices.
Before anyone says "but maybe that's what made it a good community in the
first place", you probably aren't wrong. But I keep thinking there must be a
more optimal way to do it.

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drcube
This is how it works on most message boards. I wouldn't be opposed to it being
the MO for this site too. I figure the OP ought to be able to frame their
submission however they want. The main problem is you'd get a lot more
duplicate submissions.

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gravedave
I agree, some titles are simply bad, others are virtually impossible to
decipher, like "Untitled" or "hj4jh5g4j5h.pdf".

Mods would have a much easier time not needing to edit headlines if they just
let the submitters write what the damn thing is about.

------
krupan
So you want HN to work more like Slashdot?

