

Ask HN: Why do article titles arbitrarily change? - emingo

And who does the changing? I&#x27;ve noticed several articles titles changing throughout the day. I also remember that one story I posted had the title changed. 
Just wondering!
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eranation
I believe it's HN mods who change titles that don't comply to the guidelines
(e.g. misleading title) usually they just change the title to the title of the
article.

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krapp
I wonder why the script doesn't just try to parse the metadata (and maybe H1)
from the submitted site? That would impartially cover most cases, I think.

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mcintyre1994
If a title is misleading or linkbait, we're meant to adjust it on submission.
It'd be a good idea if the rule were just that you must use original titles,
but it's a bit more nuanced and does seem to need some human oversight.

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krapp
Fair enough.

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tokenadult
The Hacker News welcome message

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

gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site
guidelines.

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

One of the guidelines is to prefer submitting original article titles:

"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or
exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an
article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's
important.

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

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

The Hacker News FAQ

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

gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The
welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially
there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude
or dumb in comment threads."

~~~
emingo
hm I read that thing when I joined, but I guess memory is a funny thing!

Thanks for the answer :)

