
Ask HN admins: please stop editing submission titles - gnosis
The widespread practice of admins changing submission titles is incredibly annoying and obnoxious.<p>I would be more forgiving if the edited titles were actually clearer and more descriptive than the titles the submissions originally had.  But much of the time they are worse.<p>Sometimes the titles will be changed to the title the article originally had.  This would be fine if the title was a good one.  But often the original article title is not very descriptive, and the submitted title is better.  In this case, changing the title to the original article title helps no one.  It makes the submission look more vague, obscure, and generic.<p>If the title changing was actually improving the site, I'd be all for it.<p>But you guys are incompetent, and are making HN worse.  Please stop it!
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mindcrime
You're probably wasting your time here. A previous thread about this got a lot
of attention, and I got a nastygram from pg as a result, basically saying
"quit wasting everyone's time with this issue." I don't think they're likely
to change this policy anytime soon. Good luck, though.

~~~
niggler
His nastygrams are awesome:

Subject: "stop"

Message: "Please don't rewrite headlines to change the meaning."

~~~
isalmon
I agree! How about this one: <http://i.imgur.com/QwuX5aA.png>

Edit: I'm talking about 'awesomeness' of his comments, not 'nastyness', don't
take it out of the context pls.

~~~
dmix
That definitely fits the nasty criteria.

~~~
isalmon
It was more about 'awesome' rather than 'nasty'.

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davidroberts
Very often the original article title assumes the reader is already familiar
with a particular context, based on the fact he or she is already visiting the
site it is hosted on. This of course does not apply to readers of Hacker News
who see the article title totally out of context, surrounded by other
articles.

I can see the value in editing titles that excessively call attention to
themselves, include a comment by the poster, or inaccurately reflect the
content, No one wants the front page of Hacker News to look like a page from
Craigslist. The title should accurately describe the content of the article so
readers can quickly decide whether to open it or move to the next one. The
question asked by moderators should be whether the title fulfills this
purpose, not whether it conforms to some bureaucratic guideline. Life is
already too much distorted by slavish devotion to bureaucratic guidelines
without bringing that mindset to Hacker News.

~~~
gnosis
Too often the original article's title just plain sucks, even if the article
content is good.

Many authors are good at writing interesting, informative, and useful content,
but simply suck at choosing good titles.

I think some of them don't realize that on news aggregation sites like HN,
articles often sink or swim by their title. At the very least, HN users will
often not bother to look at something with a boring or generic looking title,
and never know that the content was worth it.

Of course, if the submitted title was clearly abusive, like some ebay auction
titles, using visual garbage like "* * * * L@@K * * * *", then those those
submissions should just be deleted and their submitter warned and then banned
if they persist.

But changing titles (by their submitters) to something more informative and
interesting than the original article title should be allowed and even
encouraged, as long as the new title is not misleading.

If HN admins did this themselves, that would be great. But way too often they
change the titles to be more boring and generic (which is sometimes closer to
the original article title, and sometimes not). This helps no one. They're
effectively making HN less interesting, because fewer people will look at
articles with boring and generic titles.

~~~
davidroberts
Actually, writers rarely choose the titles to their articles. That's what
editors do. So it's the editors of publications that suck at choosing good
titles, not the writers.

~~~
gnosis
Many HN submissions are of articles written by authors who don't have any
editors. Those articles are self-published either on blogs, personal websites,
or forums.

Anyway, regardless of whether an author or editor is responsible for the
title, way too many titles to articles with good content suck. Improving on
those titles while staying faithful to the article's content should be
encouraged, not discouraged or tampered with.

------
readme
I find their changing of titles to be accurate, usually. It's nice that they
change linkbait titles to accurate ones.

Nothing is worse than when someone posts a story then twists the title to fit
their own interpretation of it.

Thank you oh wise and objective admins.

~~~
mindcrime
_It's nice that they change linkbait titles to accurate ones._

Yes, and if that's all that happened, I doubt most people would complain. The
problem is when more accurate / descriptive titles get changed to ones that
are _less_ representative of what the linked content is actually about. And
yes, this absolutely does happen.

~~~
cube13
From what I've seen, it's usually the opposite. A fairly neutral, descriptive
title is changed to the linkbait article title.

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coderdude
Meh, it's dumb to call them incompetent over this. Have you seen how good they
are at stopping spam, for one? Sometimes the changes make sense and sometimes
they don't (depending on your point of view). I've seen it go both ways. This
is hardly making HN worse. My suggestion: pick your fights, people.

------
alayne
I don't mind clarified headlines, but editorialized headlines bug the heck out
of me and they can color the discussion. Today I complained when the title was
"Are Placebos Really Sugar Pills? Or Something worse? instead of the original
"Are Placebos Really Sugar Pills?" because it added innuendo.

------
raldi
I think I like the fact that the admins edit titles, but I wish the original
title were viewable _somewhere_ in the UI, especially when it gets referenced
in a comment.

------
tokenadult
The guidelines of Hacker News

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

were actually edited to the current version quite recently, after an earlier
discussion of this issue. The current guideline language is, among other
details about titles,

" . . . .

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

That plainly says that original titles are preferred.

The guidelines also say, "Please submit the original source. If a blog post
reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter." So
blogspam is plainly disfavored. Personally, I think that it is a rare blog
that has many posts worth submitting here, and I'm always on the lookout for
better sources from which to submit articles.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624933>

By the way, as a rhetorical matter, I'm surprised after reading through all
the other comments before posting mine that I don't see a lot of examples of
before-and-after titles to see if the submitters who don't like the curators
preserving original article titles (or shortening original article titles in a
way different from the submitter) are really coming up with titles that are
much better than the original article titles. What are the most important
recent examples you have in mind?

My own experience on HN is that when I see a cool article from a good source,
and I submit it with the original, professionally crafted title, I sometimes
submit an article that was earlier submitted by someone else, and sank into
oblivion because it was retitled in some way that made the article look dumb.
Few participants on HN have much professional experience in headline writing,
and I'd rather have most submissions be submitted with their original titles
based on my observations. (If you have convincing counterexamples, that is
examples of HN-user-made titles that were really good and more helpful than
original article titles, I'd be glad to consider those examples.)

~~~
Bootvis
I have two examples where I'm of the opinion my title was clearly better
suited for HN.

Goodwill Hunting ([http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.nl/2012/11/goodwill-
hunti...](http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.nl/2012/11/goodwill-
hunting.html)) which I changed to something like "An investment bankers take
on the Autonomy take over. This blog is well written and I've read every post
on it but in most cases the subject of a post will only become clear when
reading the post. Thus it is a bad title for use on a news aggregator.

GNU Typist (<http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/>) which I changed to "GNU
Typist: Universal typing tutor" which is a variation on the first sentence of
the page. My title clearly describes what one can expect, is not overly long
or linkbaity.

Interested in the opinion of other HN'ers on my edits.

~~~
charliepark
I think your edits were both good. Were they changed by HN editors?

~~~
Bootvis
Yes, and to add:

I willingly and knowingly broke the rules for the greater good. I expected
that this would be better received here.

------
charliepark
Because this thread seems, sadly, devoid of examples (when there are plenty),
I wanted to point out one that's active right now.

The front page's #2 link at the moment
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5144325>) is currently titled "Cache
Rules Everything Around Me". That's better than the article's actual title,
"Cache Money Hoes". I suspect that if the article's original title were used,
far fewer people would have bothered to check it out, to have learned from it,
to upvote it, or to comment in the thread about it.

I don't know if an editor will change it to the original title, but I
certainly hope they leave it alone.

------
DigitalSea
Refresh your inbox, you're going to be receiving a nasty email from PG soon...
Having said that, I haven't seen many instances where a renamed title wasn't
accurate. However, I would love to see a little label below the new title
informing everyone the title is edited from the original. All it needs to say
besides the timestamp beneath is: [title edited] or even just: [edited]

------
vacipr
This has been discussed before. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102013>

------
enraged_camel
My main issue with changed titles is that it makes the submissions incredibly
difficult to find later. Often times I'll mark them in my mind as
"interesting" to come back to later, but when the titles change I find myself
having to scan through every single title.

------
nonamegiven
MyTitle: Another discussion of something on HN that will not change.

If you don't use the original title it'll probably get changed. There's
nothing you can do about that.

If you care, add a comment after submitting, and put the title you would have
preferred there, as I did at the top of this comment. In fact you could do
that even if you're not the submitter.

------
davidroberts
I'd be interested in hearing the rationale for changing the titles.

~~~
stephengillie
We could present both the original title and the updated one within the
comments thread, and allow people to vote on which title they like more.

~~~
gnosis
The thing is that the attention a submission gets is almost completely
determined by the title.

A crappy title will ruin the chances of most people even bothering to look at
the comments.

So I don't think this is a workable idea. Just leave the submitted title as
is, and let the HN readers vote it up if they think it's worth it.

~~~
niggler
I wonder whether a simple post-downvote would be more effective than the
existing flagging mechanism

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bennyg
The only problem I have is that they tend to "Engineerize" the titles, if you
will. The new titles are usually more bland. Maybe it's selection bias, but
when I notice it's usually a "well, that was a lot more intriguing the first
time I clicked this submission."

I dunno' - I can see the pros and cons of having more emotional or attention-
getting titles, just as I can see the same for the "this is the information in
the article" kind of title too. It's a tough line to balance on. Personally, I
dig the emotion side more, but I also know I don't speak for everybody.

------
bane
I'm personally fine with the policy. In several cases, where the title was too
long, their edit of the title was better than mine.

------
6thSigma
I think the submission system may auto-change some titles. For instance, I
submitted an article awhile back with the title something like "5 Reasons
Technology is changing in 2013" and it posted as something like "Some Reasons
Technology is changing in 2013."

Not really what you're referring to, but I thought it was interesting.

~~~
ElliotH
It was almost certainly previously submitted if it changed immediately like
that. (It's not listed in your submissions page)

~~~
6thSigma
It was the "Common Tech Myths That Cost You Money" article. I was incorrect
that it changed from a number to "some;" but it did purge the number.

~~~
ElliotH
I stand corrected.

------
readme
x-post from the consumerist thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5143224>

\--"Please change the link title"

------
grecy
Worse is the articles they completely censor because they have some vested
interest in the article not becoming popular.

i.e. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5098218> had 200 points when it
vanished from the front page.

------
geuis
Dear alumni and editors:

Please continue changing bad titles, changing links to original content,
hiding bad stories, and banning abusive troll users. You make HN a lovely
place, despite your somewhat behind-the-curtains wizardly appearance.

Love,

Me.

------
jpdoctor
Could not disagree more.

Hell, I wish they'd hellban question-mark titles.

------
betelnut
Seeing both would be nice - something along the lines of:

"Original Title [A brief description if the original title is insufficiently
detailed]"

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deelowe
I prefer that the headlines be rewritten. If I want what you're describing,
I'd go to reddit.

~~~
crb3
So you prefer Slashdot?

