
Why we revert to original titles - pg
In the HN guidelines, we ask submitters to use original titles when
possible.  When they don&#x27;t, we often change the title of a post
back to the original title of the article.<p>There is an ongoing trickle of complaints about this, as if we were
engaged in some sort of sinister conspiracy.<p>Titles on HN are not self-expression the way comments are.  Titles
are common property.  The person who happens to submit something
first shouldn&#x27;t thereby get the right to choose the title for
everyone else. This would be clearer if we didn&#x27;t let submitters
enter a title-- if our software simply let people submit urls, and
retrieved the title from the page.  We don&#x27;t do this because it&#x27;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&#x27;t make it comment.<p>It&#x27;s true that when submitters change titles, their new titles often
contain more information than the article&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>(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.)<p>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&#x27;t.  Moderating HN is no one&#x27;s
full time job.  And frankly it&#x27;s not that big a deal anyway.  If
we&#x27;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&#x27; original titles are not maximally
informative.
======
SeoxyS
I think the biggest problem in reverting to original titles is that
oftentimes, the original title is not bad, but it only makes sense in the
context of the original blog in which it appears. In a social aggregator, it
suddenly doesn't make sense anymore.

Consider this title:

    
    
        A New Beginning
    

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:

    
    
        PHP project changes direction, elects new leader

~~~
3825
To play the devil's advocate, we already have the URL so the title (at least
directly on [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com),
experience on hn-android and other clients will vary):

    
    
        A New Beginning (us.php.net) 
    

Is that not good enough?

~~~
anigbrowl
No. Titles like that are often heavily biased towards regular readers of a
blog/forum/interest group, and meaningless to people outside that small
circle, even though the article itself may be well worth knowing about.

~~~
cube13
Github submissions are typically terrible with it. Especially because people
use their personal repos as a blog of sorts, which means that it's hard to
tell when a submission from Github is an official blog post, a code repo, or
an article to read.

For example,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573101](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.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's a good point. I've had a similar problem with submissions from
google.com, which may be official google stuff or may be comment from Groups
or G+ (though I think this might have been fixed by showing more of the URL,
haven't checked lately).

------
anon1385
>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.

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.

~~~
tptacek
The problem is that they have a simple policy that makes total sense based on
their principles (first person to post a story doesn't have special
privileges, and posts are community property) and their limitations (part time
admins).

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.

~~~
saurik
> 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_.

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.".

~~~
cbhl
We're already talking about a case where users think that they're smarter than
the guidelines, and are choosing to ignore the guideline to use the original
title.

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.

~~~
diminish
hey why not have 2 titles, original and secondary... Moderators would simply
identify and delete bad secondary titles and prevent redditization...example:

A Farewell --- _Android head quits_

------
bambax
> _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 is a strange statement.

To me, a submitter is an editor, not a robot stumbling on an interesting
article by pure chance. As an editor, the submitter makes a decision about
when to submit a link (the time of day matter a lot), and, yes, about how to
present the link.

Every day there are posts that make it to the front page, thanks to an
interesting spin in the title, and when suddenly the title gets reverted to
the plain original version we wonder what this is doing on the front page.

It's also strange to state that what users complain about in an _ongoing_
fashion, is "not that big a deal".

Anyway, there would be a simple solution to this: when the title is changed by
moderators, save the submitter's title, and show both versions (one under the
other, one smaller than the other).

I wrote a little script that does just that (it saves every new submission,
and then when called on the page, checks if the title changed and if yes, adds
the original title as a subtitle); it worked fine until HN switched to https.

I'll re-release it as a browser extension soon if anyone's interested.

~~~
001sky
_To me, a submitter is an editor_

To be fair to PG, this is not his view. His view is also not unreasonable. By
delegating editing to the publishers, he provides a defence against PRs
astroturfing HN. So, he is able to kill two birds: lower overhead and higher
signal to noise.

The obvious problem is the edge case, where the original title is hopelessly
too general (although perhaps was accurate in the context it was originally
published). Along with the other edge cases (obviously false/misleading or
flamebait). The latter are subject to moderation (per his note above).

The "out of context/overly general" situation is the grey area, with no easy
fix. It seems a smaller price to pay than the having PRs editorialize every
post (option 1) or people blog-spamming externally modified links (option 2).

~~~
lobster_johnson
> By delegating editing to the publishers, he provides a defence against PRs
> astroturfing HN

Maybe I misunderstand the use case you are referring to, but isn't the PR
always the publisher (or in cohorts with the publisher)? In other words, you
can't use original titles to prevent astroturfing because the original
title/content itself is tainted.

~~~
001sky
What you are trying to avoid is the "house of mirrors", with HN being the fun-
house. PR work done through a publisher is not astroturfing, its "normal PR
work". PRs disguising their paid work as "grass roots" support, though, is
planting "fake grass". The latter is the definition of Astroturf. If you have
PRs overwriting PRs, you just get a house of mirrors effect and start
increasing noise/signal.

~~~
lobster_johnson
But surely the PR people would be in charge of the astroturfing, and hence in
control of the titles used?

~~~
001sky
That's exactly why (i'm assuming) PG doesn't want HN users re-writing the
headlines. Its sort of like saying take 1 level of PR spin, and then discuss.
The other option is take 2 levels of PR spin, and then discuss. The problem
with the latter is that you end up with a matrix: AA AB BB BA, two of which
are worse...

------
anigbrowl
_We do sometimes change titles from the original when the original title is
egregious linkbait_

Indeed, but the guidelines (as they currently stand) do ask people to edit
both linkbait and titles with gratuitous information (like _10 amazing_ ways
to get your blog post featured on Hacker News). Granted, people will sometimes
editorialize (injecting their opinion into titles) or put outright incorrect
information in titles, but we already have a good flagging mechanism to deal
with this, not to mention people's ability to comment on title abuse.

The problem is that a lot of worthy articles are given shitty titles by
publishers - the title of an article is very often _not_ what an author
intended, but what an editor decided would draw more eyeballs. This is
particularly a problem for science articles, where the article deals with some
interesting but typically slightly obscure discovery, but the title is pure
linkbait. For example, some weeks back I submitted a post about the rather
surprising discovery of polypropolene on one of Saturn's moons by a NASA
probe; the title on the article was 'common household plastic found in space'
which makes it sound like someone had accidentally dumped a bunch of spoons
out of the ISS (and which led to the top comment being a moan about the crappy
title, calling me out for _not_ changing it - in fact I had, but the mods had
reverted it). The web is awash in linkbaity titles, and they tend to be either
misleading or to obscure the aspect of the news that's 'of interest to
hackers.'

I think the policy should be to trust members. If some HN users persistently
editorialize or supply misleading titles, then they'll be flagged and lose
credibility or get banned, dependent on how deliberate and egregious their
title abuse. Members who submit informative titles will correspondingly be
promoted. The karma/user identity system functions perfectly adequately in
this respect. I agree that moderators ought to focus on moderating discussion
(and reducing the prevalence of mean or stupid comments); reverting titles
seems like a pointless distraction from that task.

~~~
S4M
> I think the policy should be to trust members. If some HN users persistently
> editorialize or supply misleading titles, then they'll be flagged and lose
> credibility or get banned, dependent on how deliberate and egregious their
> title abuse. Members who submit informative titles will correspondingly be
> promoted. The karma/user identity system functions perfectly adequately in
> this respect. I agree that moderators ought to focus on moderating
> discussion (and reducing the prevalence of mean or stupid comments);
> reverting titles seems like a pointless distraction from that task.

How about introducing a karma threshold above which you are allowed to chose
the title for the links you submit?

~~~
anigbrowl
Maybe, but only if it were low. I've always felt that astute editing of a
title makes a submission more useful and delivers value to other HN readers,
and don't see how new members should be deprived of that avenue for
differentiating themselves. I definitely pay attention to individuals based on
the quality of their submissions, and I personally think the first submitter
_should_ have the privilege of choosing an appropriate title if the original
article title is deficient in some way.

I have two reasons for feeling a bit strongly about this. One, I used to be
work as a newspaper copy editor many many years ago, so I am bringing some
professional experience to bear when I think about the headline of an article
I'm posting. Two, what is 'of interest to hackers' is often tangential to the
main subject of the article. Take an example from today's headlines (though I
haven't posted any articles about it): I'm not really interested in the fact
that two murderers are running around Florida after being incorrectly
discharged from prison, but I am interested in the fact that it's possible to
engineer such a discharge by filing falsified documents with the court system,
which I think most people would agree is a classic system hack. So if I were
submitting a story about this, I'd use a title that drew attention to that
aspect of the story, which has been little commented upon by the general
public because it seems like a nerdy detail.

------
j_baker
You know, it seems like the solution here is to be able to distinguish the
original title and the submitter's commentary about the title. To borrow from
another comment in this post, something like:

    
    
        A new beginning
    

...could become:

    
    
        A new beginning (PHP elects new leader)
    

It's tempting to say "Titles shouldn't include commentary", but I think that
there are valid times where the submitter should submit commentary. Otherwise,
we just end up rewarding people for duplicating the same content with a more
linkbaity title. You can imagine a techcrunch article that just quotes the
original, but has the title "PHP Implodes as Leader Steps Down".

~~~
trendspotter
I really like your idea. I suggest that HN shows the original title first and
in a second "sub-headline" in italic letters the "commentary" headline by the
submitter. Like:

    
    
       A new beginning
                                              
       *PHP elects new leader*                         
                     
                                                                    
                                    

_After thinking about it, here is a even better solution:_

Let titles allow to be flagged by the community. Example below:

    
    
      submission X by kdzsb 22 minutes ago | flag title | flag discussion | 9 comments
    

Moderators would simply edit flagged bad titles. Rather than having them to
watch all titles (old rules) or no titles at all (new rules).

------
lmm
> 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.

So do it automatically then. It's ridiculous to say "we can't do this
automatically because that would be too inflexible... so we'll get human
moderators to blindly follow a process without thinking instead".

What happens now is that users put a lot of thought into a good title for the
page they're submitting, and then a mod comes along and just trashes it. It
should not be surprising that this upsets people.

------
clarkmoody
One of the most helpful title additions is the (YEAR), for older articles.
This gives nice context for the reader, before clicking the article.

~~~
001sky
Yes, an obvious cue for something that is not news, but may be interesting
seems wholly appreciate. I think HN is pretty good about this in general for
articles not in the current calendar year. Such a modification is not
editorializing or biasing the content in anyway, too. So this keeps a
consistency in place on that front.

------
comex
The thing is that even if the original title is what "the author intended" on
a blog where (a) it will usually be accompanied by some or all of the text and
(b) context about who the author is is evident from the rest of the site, in
my opinion many of them are essentially meaningless out of context -
anecdotally, especially for more personal posts where a descriptive title or
anything that seems like SEO might seem too formal. When posts are modified to
these titles on the HN front page, readers are left to click either due to
domain recognition (which isn't always there) or mere curiosity, without a
clue what they'll find at the link. This is unfair, since the post may be
highly interesting yet has to compete with many other posts with better
titles. Not that big a deal, but when you're actively going out reverting
titles of popular posts, IMHO, it would be better to add some basic context if
easily available.

------
smegel
> 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.

Your assuming that the original "title" is relevant to the point of the
submission. Or that there even exists a "title" in a meaningful way. People
might be making a submission reflection some content in an article that does
not relate to the title, or where the title would be misleading or irrelevant.

A title might not be "comment", but it is part of the submission - why
shouldn't the OP have the right to set the context of discussion? It's not
like it prevents others from raising different point in the comments.

> The only option is to revert to the original title, which is at least what
> the author intended.

The original author didn't intend for their article to be shared and discussed
on HN. And why their "intent" is terribly important in the first place escapes
me somewhat.

> the increasing prevalence of mean and stupid comments has a much higher
> priority than the fact that authors' original titles are not maximally
> informative.

Yet you obviously do care enough to apply this policy in a forceful and
unwarranted way. Why not just leave it then, and provide a "report
editorialization" button so poorly worded or sensationalized titles can be
brought to the mods attention, just like bad comments.

You think you are improving HN with this policy but your not, or just don't
care about the holistic value of a submission, including it's title, to the
culture of HN. Which is rather sad.

------
lifeformed
Why not just mention that on the submit page? I had no idea this was a rule.
The submit page doesn't say anything about using the original title.

~~~
pg
That's a good idea.

~~~
anigbrowl
If you're doing that, please also revisit the guideline about not posting with
linkbait titles - because that's usually why I edit, and it's frustrating to
replace a linkabity title with a more factual one only to see it reverted
later.

~~~
hamburglar
At the risk of over-thinking, it might be useful to have a "rationale for
edit" field that lets a submitter briefly make their case for changing the
title ("orig title was linkbait" etc) to make moderators' jobs easier.

------
danso
I agree that this policy is sensible from a process standpoint. However, it
does end up penalizing the writers who are bad at SEO, or just don't
care...and at the same time, it rewards the sites that do cynically partake in
link bait titles, all the while being little more than blogspam.

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)

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, my main problem with the current policy is that it lowers the overall
quality of content by encouraging content from places that are optimizing
their titles. Some places even write titles deliberately targeted at HN. Stuff
_not_ intended to "go viral" or be marketed, but rather just to provide useful
information in a non-HN context, often ends up with completely unintelligible,
out-of-context titles, like "Update". But that material is often actually
better.

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.

------
ddlatham
_The person who happens to submit something first shouldn 't thereby get the
right to choose the title for everyone else._

To throw another idea in to the mix of interesting ones proposed here already:

When someone submits the same URL with a different title than a previous
submission, allow them to see the set of submitted titles for that submission
and upvote the best title. The highest voted title (with some smoothing logic
to avoid back-and-forth flips) is the visible one.

This way submitters can use better titles than the original, but instead of
the first submitter determining the title it is decided by the group of
submitters. It would also decrease the work for the moderators.

------
eevilspock
Many comments herein make good cases for changed titles. Titles are extremely
important as they _are_ the content of the front page, and along with rank are
how we users decide what to read.

Here's a solution:

    
    
      1. Allow submitter to optionally change the title.
      2. Use the changed title, but on the comments page display
         the original title near it. 
      3. Display up/down-vote buttons next to both titles.
      4. Dynamically swap titles based on (Karma-weight?) votes.
    

In other words, let the community drive the moderation as it already does for
other things. It's imperfect as there is still a first submitter advantage,
but it will work at least 80% of the time for 20% of the complexity.

~~~
derefr
Another solution:

1\. Allow submitters to submit with whatever title they want, but pull the
//title from the page anyway, just to store it.

2\. Add an option beside the article (maybe visible only on the expanded view
of the article-abstract that appears on the comments page) called "flag
title". If a few people click this, the title is automatically reverted to the
retrieved+stored version.

This way, the people who _do_ "read every article on HN" will be made
responsible for deciding what is, or is not, editorializing -- but instead of
giving them unlimited power to change the title, they may only reset it to the
"true" title. I think that provides the proper balance of incentives.

~~~
eevilspock
You're approach works too and I'd think HN would do better by either. My
variation considers the case where the original is worse than the imperfect
submitted one.

------
gojomo
Easiest solution (more eyes, no new development):

Give more people title-edit privs, but set an expected-behavior standard that
to edit, you are expected to (a) read the article; and (b) emphasize
informativeness over either editorial-spin or originalism. Right now the
"defaulting to original is always OK" rule is encouraging attentional abuse
(by both mods and readers).

Far-out solution (some development/assessment needed):

Allow alternate titles to coexist; have a separate voting tournament between
them.

I understand PG's priorities, but the Scylla and Charybdis of bad-submitted-
titles and bad-original-titles is wasting a lot of readers' time, _and_
biasing followup discussions in a more ignorant and acrimonious direction.
(Bad titles feed into PG's 'much higher priority' as well: they are the
'broken windows' indicating that no one is watching the store. If no one has
time to help get titles right, who's going to curate the much more numerous
and twisty threads?)

Great titles are an art and a gift to readers. Improving titles is a major
opportunity for the social news web. Empires like Drudge and HuffPo have been
built on pulling out buried ledes from elsewhere, sometimes abusively but very
often to the reader's benefit. HN should be open to innovation here.

(BTW, the twitter account @HuffPoSpoilers is a thing of beauty in this space,
much larger than just a joke. It takes the HuffPo interest-piquing titling the
one necessary step further, removing the tease and delivering the payoff all
at once. It Is The Future.)

~~~
anigbrowl
_Right now the "defaulting to original is always OK" rule is encouraging
attentional abuse [...]_

Quite so, not least among publishers for whom HN is a major source of traffic
(various news sources that focus heavily on SV and startups).

 _BTW, the twitter account @HuffPoSpoilers is a thing of beauty [...] It Is
The Future._

Agreed, and thanks for drawing this to my attention. I need bots that do this
sort of semantic analysis automatically for everything.

------
bowlofpetunias
Missing the point IMHO. Changing the title isn't the problem. Lack of
transparency is. That's what causing the complaints and conspiracy theories.

Which BTW is also a form of being "mean" (especially when the same opaqueness
is applied to harsher forms of moderation), so if the increase of mean
comments is a high priority, you may want to consider setting the tone.

Anonymous moderation without transparency feels an awful lot like bullying.

HN has grown to a point where most users have no clue who "pg" is, and what
his motives are for running this forum. You're the wizard behind the curtain.
I don't think you're gonna solve the issues of a growing community by keeping
it that way.

------
Fuzzwah
Thank you for clearing this up.

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?

~~~
nmcfarl
I think these are exceptionally good ideas.

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.

------
molecule
It would be appreciated if the moderators would make an attempt to not obscure
information when choosing to modify titles, e.g.:

> The new title, "Leaving Twitter", is much less descriptive than the previous
> one, "Nathan Marz is leaving Twitter". Could someone please change it back?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5386284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5386284)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Other than a physical mistake of clicking the wrong link in a moderation
interface I can't see how anyone can support this as effective moderation?

------
cbhl
Maybe we could change the social norm on HN, rather than seek a technical
solution.

Users who think that the original title is a poor fit for Hacker News can
create a post on (say) their own blog with the desired title, a brief summary,
and a link to the original article and context -- similar to "reblogging" on
Tumblr and such sites. Then, they submit their "reblog" page to Hacker News.

If the new title is indeed more useful than the original title, the
"reblogged" post should get more clicks, upvotes, and comments than the
original submission, and because the "author's original title" on the
reblogged post is the editorialized title, reverting to the "original title"
does the right thing (in the eyes of the submitter). And if it isn't a helpful
title, the link just falls off of newest like every other link that get
submitted.

Thoughts?

~~~
tptacek
This is exactly the right approach, and has the added benefit of offering the
submitter an opportunity to editorialize and summarize to their heart's
content without taking something unfairly from the community.

~~~
anigbrowl
...except for the HN guideline that specifically asks people to post the
original article: _Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports
on something they found on another site, submit the latter._

I personally wish this were more rigidly enforced, because there's an awful
lot of filler material on the net which basically consists of little more than
a link and a 50-100 word wrapper (as opposed to a more comprehensive article
that cites some other links). To my mind HN is most effective when it allows
readers to avoid the usual tides of blogspam that seem to make 80% of daily
'content' production.

~~~
cbhl
I agree that submitting the original source will, in 90% of cases, be the best
option.

But, in the other 10% of cases, between editorializing on HN and
editorializing on a blogspam post, I'd prefer the latter as it would still
allow someone else to submit the original source with the original title.

------
X4
If you're worried about title originality, why don't you write a scraper
instead of asking for people to submit urls manually? Would be more efficient.
But, If you care about real people posting stuff, then they should be allowed
submit whatever they see appropriate. To mitigate the frustration, I think you
could allow urls to be posted multiple times with a specific scientifically
backed grace period of "n-hours" until no more duplicates are allowed. People
can still up-vote the titles they like best and the winner takes all, making
the other titles appear like collapsed sub-captions below the main-title. Hope
you understand what I mean. This would solve two problems at once. A) Custom
title's, no censorship. B) Valuable data about winning-titles, that can be
used to train a stochastic model to predict the best titles. How you use the
data from B) is up to you.

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.

------
lisper
You could make everyone happy by adding a comment field to the submission form
so that the submitter could add their own sub-title.

~~~
oakwhiz
I don't understand why HN currently considers link submissions and text
submissions to be mutually exclusive. Most of the problems with titles seem to
stem from the title being overloaded to carry additional information. A text
field for link submissions would relieve these problems by providing a proper
place for additional information that the submitter would like to add.

~~~
ChuckMcM
You can always post a comment on the article submitted which indicates the
reasoning you had for submitting it. When you submit it you end up on the
'new' page with your submission on top, if its a duplicate you end up on the
comment page for the original submission.

~~~
jamesbritt
_You can always post a comment on the article submitted which indicates the
reasoning you had for submitting it._

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.

------
trendspotter
The problem with your logic is that not every URL has a meaningful title.

There are a lot of times websites that are not optimized and use titles that
sometimes are as self-explanatory as "home". I have discovered news websites
that don't have a title for each of their articles, even larger sites like
pehub.com didn't have titles until they fixed it only some weeks ago.

So this is going to be more horrible than editorialized headlines.

 _After thinking about it, here is a easy solution:_

In addition to discussions, allow titles to be flagged by the community.
Example below:

    
    
      submission X by kdzsb 22 minutes ago | flag title | flag discussion | 9 comments
    

Moderators would simply edit the few flagged bad titles. Rather than having
them to watch all titles (old rules) or no titles at all (new rules).

------
bambax
Why changing titles ("reverting") is annoying: it doesn't matter if titles are
reverted for new posts, but it matters for posts we have already
seen/read/commented on, because it changes the name of things.

The problem is not moral or editorial; it's like when your kid misplaces your
touthbrush in the bathroom or your cleaning lady rearranges your desk. It's a
cognitive strain. A little thing, yes, but upsetting.

So the rule should be that titles can't be "reverted" after a certain number
of points or after they've reached the front page (and yet it's the opposite
that happens; reversion seems to address the most popular things first).

------
mcherm
I don't think that this is the best policy for creating useful and clear
titles on the Hacker News site.

But I __REALLY __appreciate your making this post to explain the policy and
the reasons behind it. I can go along with this even if I don 't think it's
the best policy, and now I can understand the reasoning behind it. The
openness of explaining the policy and the reasons for it are a big
improvement. Thank you.

------
YuriNiyazov
This might've been covered elsewhere, but - with regards to increasing
meanness and stupidity on the site: have you considered just adding a line of
text under the comment field that says something like "reminder: don't say
things that you wouldn't say to a person's face in real life"?

~~~
tptacek
I wish he would just update the site guidelines. Some of the meanest,
stupidest comments on the site can be rationalized as fitting into the wiggle
room of the guidelines.

~~~
nicksergeant
But the only people who read the guidelines are those who intend to follow
them.

------
tzs
> 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.

To revert to the original title, you have to at least read the original title,
don't you? Sometimes it is evident just from the original title itself,
without looking at the content of the article, that the submitter's title was
better. For example, when John Graham-Cumming shut down his blog, the
submitter took the title of jgc's blog entry, which was something generic like
"Shutting down my blog", and simply added who it was, so it because something
lie "John Graham-Cumming: Shutting down my blog".

It would be nice if the mods could at least let that kind of submitted title
survive.

------
T-hawk
There's also the question of, what actually counts as the title of a web page?

There's at least three options: the HTML <title>, the URL, and some line of
large text within the page. And of course there could be many headings or
subheadings within the page. Some of the discussions about changing titles
arise when the submitter chooses one of those and a moderator changes it to
another.

Is it worth looking into improving conflict resolution here? Should moderators
know to look at the HTML title and keep it if it's better than an in-page
title?

~~~
krapp
I would consider meta tags as well (even giving them precedence over the
title) -- if they've got open graph tags or meta description and whatnot,
since those are meant to describe the content to third parties anyway.

------
smackfu
Ironically, this post is a good example of a title that makes sense on this
site, but becomes ambiguous when taken out of context. Who is the "we" if you
don't know the post is by pg?

------
ollysb
I can thin of whole host of reasons that a different title makes sense. Maybe
the article's relevant to an ongoing debate on HN, perhaps only a particular
detail in the article makes it relevant to HN, see comments for others. I
can't remember seeing a single occasion where reverting the title has been an
improvement. HN is a pretty smart crowd, the evidence is that they're pretty
constrained with titles but change them where it makes sense, can't we just be
trusted to get on with it?

~~~
roryokane
Some title changes are bad, but I do remember one title change that was
partially good. Someone posted a link to the site
[http://lobste.rs/](http://lobste.rs/) with a title like "Yehuda Katz creates
new Hacker News competitor". But that was factually false - Katz was merely an
early user, and was not involved in creating or running Lobsters. The story
got what you could consider an unfair amount of attention, since I bet many
people clicked on it just because of Katz's name.

The mods eventually changed the title to "Lobsters". That failed to convey the
relevant information that the site is like HN, but at least it removed the
false information about the creator.

------
bentcorner
I don't complain about changing titles, but now that we're here: I don't mind
them all too much, except when the submission comments are tied to the title
some way (e.g., a submission's title reflects a commentary on a small part of
a larger article). If the submission title were to change to match the
article's title, the context of the comments are lost.

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).

------
benologist
It's a genuine shame to destroy submissions that don't include vital context
in their titles because they weren't written for external sites, and to make
it impossible to submit and discuss _why_ something is interesting or
highlight _part_ of an article rather than whatever the title spotlights.

Text submissions with a link in the comments might be a nice solution for
people who don't want to contribute to what is essentially a manual RSS
reader.

------
rajivtiru
I know HuffPo A/B tests their titles to see which one gets better metrics and
changes/sensationalizes their titles that way.

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...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/how-the-huffington-post-uses-real-
time-testing-to-write-better-headlines/)

~~~
anigbrowl
Exactly.

------
mathattack
It would seem like the issue here is the trade-off between having full time
admins, versus a simpler and less perfect title system. It's ok to argue for
"Let's go for perfect" but if you're not paying for the admins, it's tough to
make that claim.

I'm ok with the current system. HN is a free service without ads. I'll take
"Good but not Perfect" titles as the price.

------
sparktherapy
Many of the titles that I wish were re-phrased were titles from mainstream
news outlets. Good original content tends to be headed with good titles.

------
malandrew
Any particular policy on titles where Betteridge's Law applies? I asked about
this yesterday because almost all such posts become flame wars that are
exemplar of the commentary we don't want on HN. When the title drops the level
of discourse it should be addressed.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6566940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6566940)

------
doki_pen
My biggest pet peeve with HN 2013 vs. HN <2012 is the article titles. There
used to be a strong culture of never editorializing and always letting people
know what they are clicking. Lately I have no idea what the article is about
by it's title. Many are even link baity. It makes it much harder to skim
through the list of titles for something I may find interesting.

------
mattmaroon
Totally agree. Most people here are smart, we don't need submitters
editorializing, which is usually what title changes are.

~~~
anigbrowl
Being smart, we can also generally tell when a title is editorializing, and
weigh that against the quality of the original source in deciding whether or
not to click. If all titles are auto-reverted, then we're at the mercy of the
crappy editorializing of the publisher; I feel I have to check out stuff with
stupid titles because _maybe_ there's a cogent article behind it.

~~~
mattmaroon
I can't tell if a submitter is editorializing or the original article is until
I click through. If I know it's the publisher because titles aren't altered, I
can simply not click through if I'm not interested. If it's the submitter,
then maybe there's a great article there that I'd miss because of it.

~~~
anigbrowl
I disagree. Most editorializing is obvious, because people who can't see the
difference between facts and personal opinion tend to make free with the
adjectives.

~~~
mattmaroon
I think you misunderstood. It's obvious when there is editorializing. However
without clicking through, there is no way to know if it's the article's actual
title doing it, or the submitter, because you don't know if it was changed.
Unless all submissions use the actual title (or none I suppose).

~~~
anigbrowl
Ah, I see. I feel like I am pretty good at guessing based on the source and
the poster history, but I'd have to try a controlled test to know that's not
just my bias.

------
DanBC
> the increasing prevalence of mean and stupid comments has a much higher
> priority than the fact that authors' original titles are not maximally
> informative.

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.)

~~~
jff
AKA how to ensure the hivemind remains strong

~~~
DanBC
It's nothing to do with hivemind - it's entirely to stop mean and stupid
comments.

------
huhtenberg
As many before me have suggested - please preserve original titles and have a
profile option to choose between them and moderated versions. Unless I am
missing something obvious this is dead simple to do and it will resolve this
issue once and for all.

------
wbond
One thing that would make this issue so much less annoying is if a guid was
added to each item in the RSS. That way users wouldn't see the same article
multiple times as the title keeps getting edited.

------
TrainedMonkey
When I view HM news page my screen is 90% empty space. Why not add an option
to display both original title and author title? This way everyone could set
their preference (Original only/Custom only/Both - with additional option of
which one to display first).

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.

------
pbhjpbhj
> _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._ //

This doesn't make sense.

If the extra info added to the title is false, how did the moderator know
without reading the article? If they didn't read the article what basis do
they have to revert the title? If they did read the article then we shouldn't
be getting issues like the "leaving twitter" reversion unless it's a mistake
in a moderation interface or something.

Seems like a crazy way to do moderation - gather user submitted title, assume
those titles are wrong and revert them, then return to the title and re-
instate when there's objections.

There's sub-optimal and then there's eating soup with a fork.

------
marvin
This thread is full of comments debating the merits of editorializing titles.
I think a lot more would be gained by spending that same energy debating
solutions to the more pressing issue also highlighted by pg: Methods to reduce
the number of mean, dismissive, stupid or downright incorrect comments.

Maybe not quite as sexy, but much more constructive towards the goal of having
a good online community.

~~~
krapp
What could be done that wouldn't amount to censorship? You could give
downvoting rights earlier I suppose, or give users a killfile feature, but
people have already mentioned how that might create a bubble effect.

I suppose charging people for joining up might work, maybe even a "real name"
policy (though personally i'm really opposed to both... I also have a higher
tolerance for antagonism than what HN probably considers acceptable) and some
way of preventing throwaway accounts by matching them to logged in IPs (easily
foiled, I know.)

------
nmcfarl
Another option involving scraping, but allowing some human intervention, would
be to have a default title - and have a new, and optional "edit the title"
page for submitters.

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.

------
Amadou
Here's a real basic UX suggestion - put the rule about using the original
title right there above the title: field on the submission page.

That way at least no one is surprised that their brilliantly composed title
was changed and won't feel like it is a personal affront because they forgot
about a non-obvious rule that they probably only run into a couple of times a
year, if that.

------
gabriel34
Perhaps giving the person who posted the link a privileged comment of sorts
would help lessen the dissatisfaction with such changes. When people send a
link to HN they also want to express their opinion on the matter and believe
they have a right to a privileged attention because they were the ones who
thought the article meant enough to post here. On the other hand there is the
fact that comments are also community-vetted. If OP has a nice, insightful
point of view his comments would be upvoted, and he would have the advantage
of being the first commenter. I changed my mind midway through writing this.
Nonetheless I'll post it because I believe the discussion on what really bugs
people about the title changes is in order.

------
farmdawgnation
I think there would be fewer complaints about this practice if the submit page
explained this intent.

------
tumes
I get the intention, and this is gonna sound kind of reductive and shitty, but
there's no social contract on the internet. If you built it this way, you
gotta put in the moderation/engineering work, tighten it down, or quit your
bitching.

------
smackfu
> But we don't. Moderating HN is no one's full time job.

I've always wondered who is changing the titles. Is there a bot? Or is someone
really checking every single post to make sure the title is accurate? That
just seems like classic busywork.

------
phaus
Its really sad that you took the time to write this explanation, when a
significant percentage of the folks who responded to it don't even seem to
have read it.

They just went right back to arguing their positions in a manner that doesn't
even begin to respond to the points that you made.

Sure, some of them clearly did read it, but I think they are outnumbered by
the people who either didn't read it or didn't understand.

It would be great if they took your advice and refocused their efforts on
coming up with a solution to this:

>the increasing prevalence of mean and stupid comments

It would be a tough problem to solve, but it would make HN a much stronger
community, and a much better place to hang out.

------
jfoster
It's interesting that people devote time to complaints and conspiracy theories
about this. I've noticed that technically inclined people tend to get sucked
into things and devote disproportionate amounts of time into them.
Disproportionate to their life priorities and the return they see on that
investment of time. I used to do it as well. I think I overcame it by just
being more conscious about how I was using my time, and whether the thing I
was spending time on was important enough.

For example, if HN have spelled out that they're not changing this and they
are to be believed, then the ROI of protesting it is approximately 0.

~~~
krapp
This is probably inevitable when you have a community of programmers,
designers and UX geeks in a forum run under what appears to be an opaque set
of moderation principles.

------
smtddr
This makes plenty of sense.

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.

------
josephlord
Could software and voting solve the problem rather than moderators?

Initial title as set by first submitter. If there are multiple submissions an
"Other titles" link appears on the comments page otherwise there should be a
"Suggest title" link. On the suggest/other titles page it should be possible
to suggest titles, vote on them and possibly even discuss them. The highest
voted title (possibly needing n more votes than the current one) would appear
as the main title.

This would keep the title the property of the community and allow it to
reflect the views of those who have read the article rather than requiring
moderator time.

------
jack-r-abbit
You missed an opportunity to push people to the Bookmarklet:
[http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html](http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html)
Perhaps this would help the issue. Not sure.

------
cs02rm0
> 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.

The hard and fast rule software would use is too inflexible, ok, I'm with you.

> 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.

But the hard and fast rule of a moderator that won't read an article is all
good. Hmmn.

------
cam_l
Sure, on the other hand pg could give a little more trust to the community and
crowd-source a fix. Institute, for example, a flag and a vote on articles
which have had a name change. Just spitballing, but if they did not meet a
certain vote number and a certain percentage within a certain timeframe, then
by all means change it back!

Clearly, right or wrong, people give a shit about this, and telling them they
shouldn't is obviously producing a lot more pointless meta-conversations than
just fixing it. I am sure someone would even offer to give pg a hand to
implement it if he asked nicely.

~~~
Karunamon
To be bluntly honest, I'm shocked to see this thread existing. Granted it
explains nothing, myself and some other folks have received (very nice, but
still) "knock it off" emails from pg for complaining about some unbelievably
terrible title reverts.

The problem here, all of the complaints distilled to their base form, is that
the policy, its stated reasons for existing, and its execution are not at all
consistent or logical. This being _Hacker_ news, that tends to grate on
people, especially considering how much time we spend complaining about
contra-logical things like politics.

So we've got:

Stated principle: Titles should not be edited, they're common property

Inconsistency: Then why have a title submission box? If titles aren't supposed
to be edited ever, why is it an option?

Okay, so there are clearly instances in which titles are supposed to be
edited, pg's words above and the recently modified guidelines to the contrary.
(Inconsistency the second).

Inconsistency the third: So if title edits are allowed for aesthetic concerns
(stated guideline: rewrite headlines that are in the "$num ways to... type"),
why are headlines which are _clearly and objectively_ more descriptive than
their replacements being reverted?

Inconsistency the fourth: The moderators are clearly expected to use some
judgement in what titles to revert, yet that enforcement is hardly 100%, and
some of the calls are clearly and egregiously wrong.

Inconsistency the fifth: The suggested course of action to getting around this
is to make and submit blogspam, something else which the guidelines don't want
you doing.

Guys, I love this site, but don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.
People tend to have really good bullshit detectors, and mine are redlining
right now.

------
johnlbevan2
Have the system automatically populate the title, but allow it to be
overridden. Make overriding this default painful (e.g. after submission you
have to open the thread, click edit, enter the new title, and give a reason
for the change - then 5 community members with over 1K kudos need to vote yes
to approve this change). Most people will fall into line in not changing the
titles, but you have the flexibility and take the pain in the rare cases when
it's needed.

~~~
trendspotter
Yes, more power to the community. Wikipedia is still alive despite its massive
openness. There just need to be enough trusted watchdogs.

My idea: Have the system automatically populate the title, but allow it to be
overridden by the community. Only community members with over 1K kudos can
change the title. As soon as a second member (with over 1K kudos) wants to re-
edit the title again, the title will automatically get locked to prevent back
and forth edit-wars. Only mods and admins can then finalize title.

------
nonchalance
> we're not about to read every article submitted to HN.

How many articles reach the front page per day? I'd imagine it is a small
percentage of the total

~~~
k3n
But that's greatly influenced by titles; a classic chicken & egg problem.

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

~~~
anigbrowl
Scenario 3: content with (author's/publisher's) [sensational] title -> never
reaches front page because it sounds like a bunch of BS

------
fluxon
I'm glad this was posted; transparency is good, even if it's transparency onto
a policy dictating an imperfect solution to an insolvable problem. If I had my
way, every title would still link to the original article, but it would also
have a CSS context menu (rightclick to see) showing the full original title
AND a permalink to this post or its equivalent in the FAQ.

------
shill
An easy solution to the title problem is to display the original title (if
changed) in small text under the new title on the comment page.

------
bluecalm
What about allowing up/down voted on titles (turning downvote rights on for
everybody). If the title collects too many downvotes in relation to upvotes
then the submitter collects negative karma and the moderators are notified
about bad title. That would be less work for moderators and pointless changes
would be reduced as well.

------
gall
The distinction between comments and link titles feels a little false because
there's no obligation to link to the root of the primary source document
chain, if there even is a canonical primary source for a given story. A
submitter could legitimately wrap a link in a thin blog post on their own site
and achieve the same effect.

~~~
anigbrowl
Actually, there is such an obligation (or at least, submitters are strongly
encouraged to do this in the guidelines). But this is widely ignored, and a
distressingly high percentage of submissions are just blog churnalism.

------
mtdewcmu
Another option would be to treat different titles as different entries, and
let the better-titled links get voted to the top. But the current system seems
to already work pretty well. If it means more effort is expended in
moderation, I submit that that effort is probably not a waste. Better editing
makes better reading.

------
wallunit
What would be if you would let different users post the same URL with
different titles. And at some point merge all posts with the same URL
together, using the title of the highest voted post. That way, everything that
reaches the frontpage, will have a title approved by the community.

------
deanly
It would be interesting to experiment with scraping the <title> tag of the
linked webpage. This is what Quora does for links in questions, answers, and
comments.

I love the way that HN shows the top domain of the linked site. Very elegant,
and something that Quora (arguably) should implement.

------
ahoge
Just add a note [1] right below the title field.

There is very little stuff on that submit page. If there are 1-2 sentences,
people will read them.

[1] E.g.: "The _title_ must be the bare title of the linked article. Do not
editorialize the title unless it's too long or lacking context."

------
nmbdesign
Makes sense, thanks.

------
garrison
> The only option is to revert to the original title, which is at least what
> the author intended.

This is true when linking to blogs, but frequently in the media it is the
_editor_ of a publication, not the article's author, that chooses the title.

------
gcb0
As someone already called out, by email, about this... i think a more
effective solution would be to, you know, SAY that on the submission screen.

if all you give me is a TITLE field which cancels the text field, i may feel
inclined to replace one with another.

------
DanBC
Perhaps one of the many plug in authors just needs to create the HN
Enhancement Suite, and include "Suggested title" or "extra information" tool
tips for HN titles.

(As well as an 80 char guide for the title submission box).

------
jules
Let other people suggest alternative titles and let the community vote on the
best title! Less work for you and you get good titles and the first person to
submit the story doesn't have special privilege.

------
EGreg
It might be fun to introduce some crowdsourced summary or reputation based
summary of a title. This way HNers can see if they want to read the whole
thing.

Also would be cool to introduce tags and let people follow those tags.

------
kefs
Change titles all you want, but remove the user attribution at that point. Do
not attribute words to people who have no say in modifying/deleting those
words. This is stupid simple.

------
saraid216
Wow. A draconian policy of deliberate misinformation justified by a lack of
resources and disinterest in consideration. That just tanked all the respect I
had for you, pg.

------
raldi
If automatic fetching of titles is good enough to do a few minutes after
submission, why isn't it good enough to do at the moment of submission?

------
marze
Feedback: allow users to rate/upvote the title itself, and if it gets bad
ratings, look to change it.

Also, users could get karma bonus for well up voted title.

------
yeukhon
I will continue to say the article "Hacking the Olympic" is not informative
and misleading. It is by far the worst title I have ever seen on HN. That
title does not convey the story, only to capture people's attention and read
the actual story. This is an example moderation must take place. Such practice
is almost like a crime.

I hate to be an opposition, but I am making a valid, legitimate criticism here
and I think the mass here should think about that more often than just go
ahead and say "good job and good luck!"

------
meemoo
Why don't you just scrape the actual title, and force people to take a few
steps to change it if they feel like it needs changing?

------
Houshalter
HN titles are absolutely awful. Many titles on the front page are vague and
contain little if any information at all on what they link to. Many are vague
or simply misleading. I'll take editorializing over no information content
whatsoever any day.

And you can always de-editorialize it or make it a neutral statement wikipedia
style, rather than changing it to random words that may or may not make sense
in context of the article (which we haven't read yet.)

------
samstave
Why not have a submission look like this:

[ __ _Submitters reader-enticing paraphrase title_ __]

{Original title, in smaller text/diff font}

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iterationx
Why not just have two titles, the original and the modified one below, if
someone feels the need to modify it.

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nedwin
This post seems a lot more rational/fair when you read it in PG's voice.

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jasonlingx
> 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.

If there is no time to read, then don't moderate?

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johns
Why is there a length limit?

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k3n
The semantics of using a title kind of dictate that.

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otikik
I agree 100% with this.

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ffrryuu
Censorship

