
Moderators of HN: please stop changing post titles - there
I would ask that the unknown mysterious moderators of this site stop changing post titles long after they hit the front page.<p>The guidelines at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html state: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it." but this should not apply just because the title submitted does not match the article.  When the actual article's title makes no sense or provides no context, it should be allowed to stay changed.<p>A story is currently on the front page with a title of "Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots" which was just changed from its previously edited title of something about visualization.<p>"Where the Heat and Thunder Hit Their Shots", while actually the title of the article, says absolutely nothing about the content of the article.  Is this an article about weather?  Photography?  Nope, it's about basketball.  Why is it on Hacker News?  Oh, the submitter liked the visualizations, which is exactly what the previously edited title said before it was changed.<p>Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875857 was a story about Light Table and the title was edited to reflect that until it had at least 100 points.  Then a moderator changed it to the story's actual title of "On concepts and realities" which said absolutely nothing about it and probably caused lots of people that had already visited the link once to read it and think it was something else.<p>Moderators, please stop doing this.
======
pooriaazimi
Completely agree. It bit me once: I submitted a link to a free epub book
(hosted on GitHub), titled

    
    
        Backbone.js Fundamentals [free ebook, epub]
    

(here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831954>)

it surprisingly made it to the front page (250 votes), but soon a mod changed
the title to

    
    
        Backbone.js Fundamentals
    

So, a lot of unsuspecting visitors _(my guess is about 25000 - my personal
experience tells me most front page links get 100x visits more than their
votes)_ clicked on this link, expecting to see a web page but end up
downloading a random epub. Very soon the poor guy's GitHub account was
suspended temporarily due to excessive bandwidth usage.

I felt very bad and angry at the time.

------
citricsquid
My most upvoted comment (85 points) in my second most upvoted submission (554
points) is a complaint about exactly this. In my case they changed the title
from:

"Lights -- impressive html5 / webgl presentation built with threejs"

to:

"Lights"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107946>

~~~
pooriaazimi
I remember this one. I deliberately didn't click on that story or upvote it,
because I though it was a linkbaity article - what was the f'ing submitter
thinking? I have to _click_ on that link to see if it's something even
remotely interesting (and presumably profit such a nasty submitter by more ad-
views)? No, thank you.

After a day, I thought maybe it's something really cool that's got so much
upvotes and then clicked on it and was _literally_ blown away.

~~~
mistercow
>and was _literally_ blown away

Where did you end up? Did you land on something soft?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Literally is literally an auto-antonym used to emphasise a figurative
expression. But you win the Grandma Nazi of the Thread award. (!!)

~~~
pooriaazimi
Actually, I always chuckle when I see people use literally when they mean
_almost_ , so I intentionally misuse it to make others chuckle (though,
admittedly I think it frustrates more people than it chuckles!) :)

------
dfc
This happened to a story[1] I submitted yesterday. The title that I submitted
was something essentially:

 _Analyzing the MD5 collision in Flame (Alexander Sotirov's Summercon Slides)_

I thought it was useful/informative to include Sotirov's name in order to lend
credibility to the analysis. I did not link directly to the pdf, however in
the spirit of the submission guidelines I thought it would be appropriate to
include that the main body of the link were slides from Summercon. It was
changed to:

 _Analyzing the MD5 collision in Flame_

It is not apparent to me why the title was changed. In my opinion the changed
title was less informative to the reader and the original title did not
include any spin/hyperbole/offensive material. Mainly I am just curious as to
why the title was changed. I think it would be helpful if the moderators would
post a comment when a title was changed. This would help inform the community
about when a title is changed and educate us about what is and what is not
proper. In the long run I think this would help make the moderators job
easier...

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4098713>

------
mindcrime
Yes, yes, 1000x yes. Changing titles to remove gratuitous editorial spin is
one thing... changing titles just for the sake of changing them is silly and
counter-productive.

------
tokenadult
I can give an example of a title change AWAY from the original article title.
I was quite puzzled by that when it happened, and I've never heard an
explanation of why it happened. I heard about an article from a researcher on
human genetics who was writing to other human genetics researchers on an email
list. I meet many of those researchers in person in a local "journal club."
The researcher was asking for responses from his colleagues about the article,
and I thought the article was interesting enough to bring up here on Hacker
News. My submission of the article here

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270>

was under the original article title, namely "23andMe disproves its own
business model." The ensuing Hacker News discussion had several commenters
(who apparently had paid their hard-earned money for the services of the
23andMe company) complaining about the title, which I didn't editorialize or
spin in any way. I agree that the article was controversial, but a legitimate
researcher in the field thought that it was a worthwhile read, which is the
only reason I submitted the article to HN. After I no longer had my edit
window for the submission title, some anonymous person with title-editing
power changed the title to "23andMe finds Parkinsons only 24% heritable"
(which is a title that reveals considerable ignorance about human genetics,
and doesn't fairly represent the content of the submitted article). As I post
this, the original article is not showing up to me by following the original
link, but Google's cache

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://independentsciencenews.org/news/23andme-
disproves-its-own-business-model/)

confirms the original article title.

I can bear with curators here changing article titles to original article
titles (or to titles that condense original article titles to less than 90
characters, which is the hard-coded length limit here), but I sure would like
an explanation of what a user is to do if it's possible to submit an article
with EXACTLY the original article title (my usual practice) and then have the
title changed to a stupid-looking title that is still under my screen name. If
curators are going to do that kind of thing, they should at least sign their
edits to take accountability for them. (That is the usual practice in another
online forum where I have editing powers on other people's posts, where I use
this same screen name I use here. If I edit someone's submission title, an
edit trail identifies that I did that.)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _If curators are going to do that kind of thing, they should at least sign
> their edits to take accountability for them._ //

Yes, it's very rude to alter someone else's text without claiming 'credit' for
doing so or referring the edits back to be accepted by the attributed author.

FWIW it's also an infringement of the moral rights enshrined within copyright
law. You can't modify someone else's work without a license to do so
(generally); I couldn't find any reference to such a license term in the YC
site details. Without such a license a posted story that the moderators
dislike [is it just pg?] should just be deleted, the site clearly has no duty
to carry the story (by which I mean title and strap linking to the original
article) but it also appears to lack any license to amend said submissions.

~~~
grellas
While it is true that comment submissions to HN give an implied license for HN
to post the content, with copyright being held by the submitter, you can't
copyright names, titles, or short phrases (see, e.g., the 6th entry down in
this FAQ section from the Copyright Office -
<http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html>). Because of this, there
is no license needed to amend a title to an article as no one owns rights to
it legally.

That said, I once had a legal submission amended to a title that was really
_wrong_ legally and therefore sympathize with the sentiments expressed by
tokenadult. It is one thing to clarify or to trim fluff from a title but it is
another to guess at what a better title might be for a technical area that is
beyond the expertise of a moderator. Hence, caution ought to be used. On
balance, though, I have found the moderators to be thoughtful when they do
make such changes and so I am sure this is just one of the hazards of trying
to monitor a site that can include complex materials from varying sources.

~~~
tokenadult
_That said, I once had a legal submission amended to a title that was really
wrong legally_

Because I always appreciate your posts, and I would hate to be misled by any
title that was put on them by someone else, I'd love to see the link to the
example you have in mind.

Thanks for your comments on the legal background to the issue at hand.
Certainly my claim is not that HN cannot do whatever HN's leaders like. I am
simply suggesting that I would like to be on notice, as one user among
thousands, about what best behavior here is.

------
freehunter
_probably caused lots of people that had already visited the link once to read
it and think it was something else._

Many times have I been looking for an article I read previously and cannot
find it. It's a combination of headline editing, a really poor search engine,
and the way things fall off the front page mix with things that haven't hit
the front page yet.

------
ilamont
On occasion, I have experienced my submitted headlines being reverted back to
the original source's obscure headline. More often than not these obscure
headlines were made for a print newspaper or magazine where the lede (which HN
readers can't see unless they click through) explains the story.

In addition, the 80-character limit sometimes makes it difficult to include
the original headline for some of the more wordy publications. This forces
rewriting.

I remember HN submissions used to allow headlines that were 90 or even 100
characters long. Why not bring back these limits?

~~~
dfc
I wish the title field was exactly eighty characters so that you would know
where your title needed to be cropped, instead of bruteforcing it or piping it
to wc or cut.

    
    
      -<td><input type="text" name="t" size="50"></td>
      +<td><input type="text" name="t" size="80"></td>

------
nsns
I think, basically, the OP's request is to start distinguishing between
"spins" of titles for polemical and other questionable purposes (which should
be reverted), and titles that are honestly modified in order to call attention
to aspects that are interesting to HN readers, but might be marginal in the
original context of the article.

------
anigbrowl
Yes, it's aggravating. In an ideal world there would be a comment and
explanation, but since this would often end up derailing the subject of the
pos into a discussion about moderation, I suggest mods just abstain from doing
it or else send a note to the poster. When I rewrite the title of an article I
do so with a view to making it more accessible to HN readers.

~~~
tripzilch
Upvoted cause you're apparently the only mod that saw it worth their time to
give a reply.

Mods should obviously, as a rule, own up to whatever they moderate. I've seen
many a forum go down in flames because of "invisible modding". You almost
can't blame them, it's human nature that great power wielded anonymously will
end up being abused.

So, the obvious solution is to fix the software to display _"edited by ..."_
whenever someone edits something. I say "fix", because it's almost a bug. All
popular forum software has this feature, and there are almost no good reasons
not to enable it.

Failing that, mods can easily start taking this matter in their own hands by
simply adopting the habit of appending a short tag to whatever got edited, for
instance {ani} in your case (or soemthing like that).

------
phuu
Kinda funny how no moderators have responded... makes me uncomfortable that
this community seems to be arbitrarily moderated by invisible people.

~~~
jtheory
See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102598> (posted a little later than
your comment) -- though I'm not sure anigbrowl is a regular moderator, he just
mentions that he sometimes does change titles.

That's all I see, though -- and I agree, I was expecting to see a conversation
that doesn't seem to be happening.

Well, hopefully the mods are listening and will be more cautious in their
future edits....

------
DivisibleByZero
Definitely agree. I have been following light table religiously and missed the
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875857> story because I probably saw it
after the change. If a submission gets up-votes it is a sort of validation for
the submitted title. Tailoring a post title to the HN community is an
excellent way to bring attention to articles the community most definitely
enjoys, but would otherwise miss.

------
dredmorbius
I would prefer that the alternative of posting _either_ a link _or_
explanatory text be changed to allow _both_.

Often a title, original or otherwise, simply doesn't provide sufficient
context to clearly explain a link. A few well-chosen words of prose could help
here (more so if the text could be editied / modified while the post was
sitting in queue). Gameable? Perhaps, but we can vote down / flag in that
instance.

"Heat & Thunder" was pretty non-obvious to me, and until I read the comment
here about the data visualization, struck me as particularly non-interesting.

~~~
_delirium
I agree; that's one thing that I think has really gotten worse from the
Slashdot model to the Digg/Reddit/HN model. The Slashdot blurbs weren't great,
but a bare list of links even more emphasizes linkbait and what you might call
"easy" content (articles with one clear point that can be summarized in 5
words). In that ecosystem, anything that takes even three sentences to explain
the appeal of tends not to go anywhere.

I end up not submitting most of the long-form or academic things I think HN
readers might find interesting as a result, since just from the headline
probably nobody will know why it was submitted or why they should care.
Sometimes if I think something is _really_ good I'll make an exception and
submit, followed by posting a comment explaining why I thought the submission
was interesting. That occasionally works, but I think most people don't click
through to comments on the New page.

I'm not really blaming the readers, because I find the same problem browsing
the New page myself: in this list of cryptic headlines, the only thing that
stands out are controversy-type headlines ("Why you should never X"), and the
rest is hard to skim.

------
flabbergasted
Another title change example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121698>

I submitted a link with the title: 'Linus to Nvidia: "Fuck You"', which was
changed to: 'Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds'

My original title was much more accurate (especially since I linked to a
specific part of the video).

------
kirubakaran
At the very least, a comment should be automatically added logging "Title was
changed from X to Y".

~~~
there
I'd love it if a moderator would post something when they change a title so
it's clear what happened and who did it, but it would probably generate a lot
of useless meta threads debating the change (and of course, it would actually
reveal who the moderators are).

~~~
kirubakaran
That can be solved by all mods posting as "mod" and not having a 'reply' link
to that comment. (I am not advocating removing 'reply' link though)

------
lupatus
I agree whole-heartedly. Moderators frequently changing titles is an annoying
practice. The article's links are not descriptive (they're just id numbers),
so the article titles are how I mentally keep track of which submissions I
want to, or don't want to, read. Changing the the title makes me have to guess
if it is a new submission to hit the front page or just an old one with new
clothes, so to speak.

------
51Cards
Also couldn't agree more. It's very frustrating when this happens. Sure my
browser show's the link as "Visited" but when I don't recognize the title (or
more specifically it doesn't seem to be in reference to anything I've read
that day) I end up opening it again. As stated sometimes the reason the
article is up here is not the primary focus of the article itself.

------
loup-vaillant
An example of mine: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165794>

The article was originally called _Better disagreement_. I chose to call my
submission _'How to Disagree' on Steroids: DH7_. Someone later changed it back
to the article's title.

You could say my title had an editorial spin (I'm looking at 'Steroids'), but
I resent the edit for not even keeping the explicit reference to DH7 and PG's
article.

I have chosen this title because I assumed most of HN knows about PG's
article. This submission is essentially a rehash, and therefore _not_
interesting HN material (better link to PG's article). Except for the DH7
part, which was original. By changing the title, I hoped to tell readers about
that, so they don't lose time, nor stop reading before even reaching DH7.

I also hoped a karma boost from this submission, but the title edit (which I
think was responsible for the lack of upvotes) quickly squashed that hope.
Which is the _real_ reason I was pissed off, I must admit. Plus, the
moderators cannot take the time to ponder every fishy title. I stand by the
rationalization above however: the best HN title possible certainly was not
_Better disagreement_. That title was meant for LessWrong, not HN.

------
kposehn
I had posted the recent one and after it hit the top of the first page, I
received an email to not editorialize titles in HN posts, and it was changed.

On reflection, it was quite clearly a spin and I could have made that title
much better. The mods are generally looking out for the community and trying
to keep titles as representative of the as possible.

------
lnanek2
Wish they just took care of this elegantly with the already in place voting
system. Let multiple links be submitted with different titles and let people
vote up the one with the good title. Why let some mod with personal opinions
and not enough time to know every subject and article dictate things? Let the
community decide.

------
taylorbuley
Is there any hard and fast rule on who gets mod privileges? Is it a karma
thing or a trust thing?

~~~
manuelflara
I think it's mostly some YC staff/partners/alumni who are mods.

------
pi18n
I agree with this, your examples should not have been changed. I would like to
see the converse -- if the title is the same as an article's but the article's
title is linkbait or sensationalized I would like it to be changed to
something that tells me what it's really about.

------
petercooper
I don't want them to _stop_ but just stop doing it on _titles that are already
fine_. Sure, get rid of "gratuitous editorial spin" but not helpful titles
that have context!

Pretty sad this post itself has been made dead actually.

------
lawnchair_larry
I've had this problem too. They are way too overzealous about this.

------
joering2
slightly OT: I recently been killed by HN and writing an article on it: it
wasn't easy to get resurrected as well as actually realized I've been dead!

------
bookworm97
Truth be told, you moderators are obsolete. I know that changing titles makes
you feel like you are important. But the only thing you are really needed for
is stopping spam. Stop ruining peoples post titles with your false fear of
"gratuitous editorial spin".

You should only change titles if the title doesn't even remotely match up with
the content. e.g. Title: Heat win championship / Content: Thunder win
championship

------
its_so_on
Upvoted this submission, since it's important and we should talk about it.

At the same time, I think the title-editing as actually practiced is great.
I'm pleased with the results whenever I notice the changes. (Which is usually
after someone gives good reason for the changes).

This is perfect and in line with the reason we're allowed to edit our own
submissions for a while. It's basic tweaking to make things fair and accurate,
instead of link-baity and sensational.

I can give one personal example.

In hindsight (past few weeks' performance) the original title was right and I
was wrong, but I complained about the title here or another story:
<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3993657>

Basically, I complained that it used the word "barely above its opening price"
(or another, similar word like "barely"), which I thought unfair, since 23
cents of gains in a day is perfectly normal and if sustained would be a good
trend forever.

The title was changed. (In hindsight, the negative title was justified, and my
complaint was out of place.)

This is a place where we are a tight community that can do things like accuse
each other of stabbing one another in the back, or stealing each others' text
or ideas, or whatever. People upvote. THe story comes out. Responses are
written. Soon enough we know if the original, sensational title is justified
or needs to be toned down either a little or quite a bit.

On the whole I think the moderators do an excellent job on the titles and it
serves a really important purpose. I'm not sure how to fix the other
complaints mentioned here. (Maybe put a history in there for search engines or
if people want to know how it was submitted).

I know I much prefer this to the broken titles that slashdot users had to put
up with (even after complaints) back when that site still had a readership...
proactive is much better here.

------
horsehead
Or at least an explanation of what was changed and why. it would give a little
more transparency to the site. And the same goes for link deletion, etc. It
would be nice to know why such and such comment or submission was shelved
(though some are guessable, others are not as much).

------
AffableSpatula
The people taking this action are in charge of how the content should be
presented here. You can always vote with your feet.

