
Is it hubris for HN to routinely change published titles of articles? - bookofjoe
As a regular reader and submitter, I&#x27;m always struck by how, on a regular basis, titles published by reputable newspapers, magazines, and — less frequently, but not never — scientific journals are edited and reworded and sometimes completely redone by HN moderators.
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nmc
There are a few guidelines about titles:

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or
> exclamation points, or saying how great an article is.

> If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the
> site name will be displayed after the link.

> If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf]
> to the title.

> If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd
> appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To
> Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is
> meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
> linkbait; don't editorialize.

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
bookofjoe
>unless it is misleading or linkbait

Ah, therein lies the rub.

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krapp
Setting aside the guidelines against clickbait titles or editorializing, one
has to consider the tendency on HN for readers to only engage with the title,
and not read the article at all. Assuming for the sake of argument that most
titles aren't egregiously misleading or clickbait to begin with, many might
still be triggering and need to be toned down.

Also, HN limits all titles to 80 characters, because I guess everyone is
reading this site on a terminal, so any title longer than that has to be
edited.

What I don't like (besides the character limit) is when they change the URL
and throw the context of the thread off. There ought to be some way to link
the history of comments to the history of editorial changes but I can't think
of a solution that HN would consider elegant.

~~~
bookofjoe
I like the character limit because it forces me to really think hard about the
piece in order to cram, say, a highly technical, oftimes abstruse
200-character scientific journal article title into the 80-character HN space.

~~~
krapp
HN should be able to handle a highly technical article title, though. And if
people can't, then someone can explain it in the comments.

It becomes a problem when you lose necessary context in fitting the title in
the limit, causing confusion or misinterpretation of the title. I've seen
arguments started over it. There's one current example here[0] where "India’s
Yes Bank" was shortened to Indian Bank" in the title to make up for the
original being two characters over the limit. Turns out there's an actual
"Indian Bank[1]" and now the title is misleading. All because we can't have a
title with 82 characters.

Granted, it doesn't happen often, but every time it does happen, it would have
been trivially easy to avoid by either not having a character limit for
titles, or having a more reasonable one like 120 characters.

Edit: also apparently just happened here[2].

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502649)

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22504863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22504863)

[2][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22504837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22504837)

~~~
bookofjoe
Twitter wouldn't exist if it weren't for the character limit.

~~~
krapp
Twitter's character limit was originally intended for posting on SMS, and
remained long after it was even relevant. And they extended the limit recently
anyway. And people work around it by linking multiple posts, so it doesn't
even really matter.

And... I'm specifically talking about title length, not article length. Tweets
don't even have titles.

------
rajnathani
Personal view: While it may not feel ideal, and initially the thought of it
happening did feel off, I feel that the title changes are actually very
helpful as it often results in clearer titles, which sometimes aren't very to-
the-point or are unnecessarily sensationalized.

~~~
bookofjoe
But, but — the original titles were created by either authors and/or editors
who surely must be respected for their professionalism.

~~~
rajnathani
My reply may seem a bit off-topic: Whenever I think of titles of news articles
(not research papers though), I often think of how some news organizations
have pretty ad-hoc processes of coming up with headlines (titles), for
instance this process outlined by Ars Technica [0]:

> Staffers have various methods for coming up with headlines. I prefer to
> think of my headlines first after researching but before writing the
> piece—not only does this mean I’m attacking the headline with my creative
> batteries fully charged, but the act of figuring out the headline helps also
> give the piece some shape in my head.

> Other folks have other methods, and we keep a #headlines Slack channel
> running for staffers to help workshop ideas. If you’re having trouble with a
> headline—or you can’t quite think of the right approach—everyone available
> lends a hand.

> The overall objective is to whittle the choices down to a pair of punchy but
> informative headlines that give readers a reason to click without being
> clickbait. The two headlines then both run on the front page in an A/B test,
> which shows different headlines to different visitors. The software uses
> statistical math to pick a headline "winner" based on which headline is
> selected more often by the visitors who see it in the first few minutes. A/B
> testing headlines gives us some idea of what types of headlines resonate
> best with different kinds of pieces; we use what the A/B test tells us along
> with a number of other data points to help us write better headlines.

This is not to imply that the headlines which are picked are non-optimal, but
that there is a drive to not only experiment with headlines but also to get
help from their peers on a dedicated Slack channel for it, as picking a good
headline is not easy. While you're correct in stating that there needs to be
respect for the authors and ideally thus not to change their headlines on HN,
it very much seems that picking a headline in general is inherently tough as
it involves condensing an article's overall point into less than 80-100
characters, which could result in non-optimal titles at times, and in some
cases possibly lead to poor titles.

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/no-
of...](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/no-office-no-
problem-how-ars-technicas-remote-workers-work/)

