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Why we revert to original titles
438 points by pg on Oct 18, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 220 comments
In the HN guidelines, we ask submitters to use original titles when possible. When they don't, we often change the title of a post back to the original title of the article.

There is an ongoing trickle of complaints about this, as if we were engaged in some sort of sinister conspiracy.

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. 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. But the fact that a title field is editable doesn't make it comment.

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.

(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.)

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. And frankly it's not that big a deal anyway. If we'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' original titles are not maximally informative.




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


I've come across so many examples where a perfectly valid (imho) title has been changed to something which is basically meaningless with out the context.

Here's a recent one from memory:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492781

The originally supplied title was something similar to: "My afternoon with a serial killer". It was changed to the "Center of the Universe" title.

Clicking a link titled "Center of the Universe" one would rationally think they were about to read something by an astronomer regarding the latest hubble deep space image.


I would prefer simply prefixing such simple titles with the missing context, e.x.

    PHP Blog: A New Beginning


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

    A New Beginning (us.php.net) 
Is that not good enough?


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.


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 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.


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).


In that case, yes. But what if the domain is somedudesname.com and that is the blog of some company's CEO? It'd be preferable to have a title like "XCompany changes direction, elects new leader".


But he responded to a specific example. If you want to come up with more examples, fine. But don't tell him he's wrong or do a "yes, but".


The example was only there to show that there are cases where editing the title helps. If you want to get to the best answer, don't argue against what someone said, argue against what they should have said.

Being right or wrong about dismissing a bad example doesn't matter. The important thing is to fix the example and then evaluate it.


Then say something like: "True, for that example. But a better example is...".

I guess I have a problem with jumping on someone who was correct.


Thank you for your help. I agree that the information in the URL is not always enough. I am glad it started a discussion and I hope pg reads the rebuttals to what I wrote. (github.com) is a good example. It shows why github was so eager to move gh-pages to github.io

Perhaps a way to get around the ambiguity (at least in case of github) would be to encourage people to use/link to gh-pages (so we see github.io as distinct from github.com) when they are available?


That's still not enough useful info. It tells us that someone has posted a webpage about A New Beginning on php.net, but it doesn't give us enough info to infer that it's a blog post about a new leader taking over PHP. Even worse if it's from some generic URL (blogspot.com, etc).


The biggest problem with this is the unavoidable editorializing. Its as likely to become

   PHP project takes awful turn, elects incompetent new leader.


I would argue that is a lesser problem than nobody who is interested in PHP clicking through to the HN discussion because they don't have any indication that the post is about something they are interested in.

Anyway, re-titling horribly editorialized posts is fine. The problem is that the person/people doing it seem to exercise little to no discretion when doing it.


That's not unavoidable, and when I see editorializing like that it's very obvious that it's axe-grindey editorializing which I can flag and/or comment upon.


Well, doesn't the domain affix (php.net) provide the context?


Not necessarily, for example medium blogs just show 'medium.com' with no relation to the actual blog.


How about this one from the typescript blog? The domain is not enough to provide the context here.

    *Announcing 0.9.1* (blogs.msdn.com)


php.net, sure, but what about more obscure domains?


I think that's very potentially worse. "Changing direction" is far too opinionated.


No it is not worse! Even if the title is totally biased and link-baity and whatever at least I can still guess the approximate topic the article is about. Based on this I can then decide if i am interested in it or not. But with the original title this is often impossible.

For example a few days ago there was a submission with the title "Beer". Since i am interested in beer I clicked on it. But instead of something interesting about beer I got a piece of alcohol fueled drama in the Ruby community which I am totally not interested in.

By leaving the original title I almost always have to click on all articles on the frontpage to find the 4 or 5 articles I am interested in.

Perhaps we should get rid of the complete title to make it as unbiased as possible? Just put the number 1 to 30 on a page and link them to the articles and hide the domain via javascript. This way you prevent a lot of problems... For me almost nothing would change because I already have to click on almost all the links just to figure out what's in the article and if i am interested in it.


>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.


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.


> 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.".


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.


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


So, I continue to read tptacek's comment to mean "here is something legitimate you can do", not "here's something else you shouldn't do"; if it is the latter, as you are stating, I'm not certain why it was brought up in the first place.

Regardless, I take issue with your contention and seemingly fundamental assumption that the article's original title is somehow better and will win out against alternative titles. The entire reason people get angry about this is that the alternative titles are often much more useful: they are more precise, and they are even sometimes less sensationalized.

Sometimes titles just need to be different when the material is being viewed in a different context. I've actually been chewed out before for "editorializing the title" when I wrote the original article in a case where my original didn't even have a title because the medium (Google+) doesn't use them. In other cases, the in-context title might need to be very short, but on Hacker News it should be longer.

The places you thereby see users actually complaining about this policy are not the places where the submitted title sucked. To demonstrate just how dismissive it is to claim that that is the situation we are discussing: it's like trying to end a debate on whether airport security should strip search anyone who talks about security issues because clearly everyone who does so is a dangerous terrorist.

In fact, even people (such as myself) who complain about title changes made on Hacker News often call for title changes, as to many of us the problem is "inaccuracy", not "originality": if the title says something that doesn't seem to be true (as in the case just yesterday regarding the Tesla S's usage of rare earth metals) it isn't the person submitting the link that is "editorializing", it is the original author.

Another interesting circumstance was one of the original cases from about a year ago that made this turn into a big public argument: the visualization on the New York Times about some non-hacker aspect of politics. The visualization was insanely impressive, and someone wanted to submit the visualization. The title was clear, factual, and even quite concise: it just labeled the page as being a visualization.

In this case, there were tons of interesting comments about the visualization, and people were really excited to see it: the link was clearly a success, it was voted to the front page, and not a single person was bothered that it was there... until some moderator changed the title to the original title of the visualization, which was about some political issue, and now the comments changed in tone.

Now, people were arguing about how this wasn't worthy of being on Hacker News: that political issues should be discussed elsewhere; then a fight breaks out about the underlying politics. People are infuriated that somehow this link ended up on the front page with an insane number of votes, and no one has any context due to the policy of changing the titles of posts, even after many hours of discussion in hundreds of comments, without any historical notice that it happened.

This is the kind of situation that I think it is reasonable to be bothered by; sure, there are some people who believe that the titles should never be changed under any circumstance, and to the extent to which they exist it is convenient to lump them together with everyone else because "well, people editorialize and there's linkbait so the titles should be changed QED"; but that's not the argument that I've actually seen about title changes: people just want more nuance and more transparency.


I'm trying to acknowledge that a strict interpretation of the guidelines would lead one to conclude that tptacek's suggestion is "something else you shouldn't do", since it would be "blog spam". I also think that a well-informed title and comment giving context for the original source should be "something legitimate you can do" if it provided good value above and beyond the original source itself.

I can totally see someone submitting a HN page talking about the visualization in the NYT to some meta-HN. (I was going to remark about reddit.com submissions, but most of the top ones seem to be submissions where reddit.com was the original source.)

I suspect that "more transparency" won't happen if it results in more work for the moderators; I'd vastly prefer solutions which are self-reinforcing and can come about by the community working together within the existing framework of HN.


A lot of the value of "more transparency" just comes from "if the title is changed, make certain the old title is also visible from the comments page, so people don't freak out". One time someone submitted a link to a YouTube video of a panel discussion involving Linus Torvalds where he explicitly gave NVIDIA both the finger and the F-word. The link was a link directly to the paragraph in the video where it happened, and the title was clear that that is what was being linked.

Upvoted to the front page, holding there for hours, people were having a discussion about the appropriateness of swearing in this context, the extent to which it was a joke, and about how NVIDIA has treated the Linux community. And, of course, then the title changed: it got reverted to something like "Random Panel from Random Conference".

Now, everyone was really confused: the comments were all concentrating on this one moment in an hour long video (linked to semi-directly, but still like 30 seconds after the link), and freaking out about how people were so uptight and shouldn't be concentrating on that, and that there was all of this other content there.

When the title changes, it drastically changes the character of the discussion: while this website is also a link aggregator, I know of very few people who believe that that is its value; instead, people like Hacker News because of the comments: it is a discussion forum. You can't just change the title of the discussion forum while people are actively discussing things without causing a catastrophic situation.

This is thereby what I mean by "transparency": I don't mean a moderator spending even an extra 30 seconds explaining "why" something happened... I just mean that the site needs to make it clear that something did happen, or these massive arguments break out and a bunch of people are left unhappy and angry. As long as title changes are going to happen to discussion threads that already have hundreds of comments, you at least need to have a boolean "title changed" notice.

That aside, the "nuance" aspect (which I think is even more important than the "transparency" part, as you might just decide "old posts should never have their title changed" and the transparency is less important) would probably require more time from the moderators. I am not certain how to get around that: I think moderation fundamentally requires nuance.


edited my comment

There just need to be enough watchdogs.

A very simple solution would be that titles can 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).


Minor point: flag discussion should probably be flag submission. The current flag action is more for flagging a submission not suitable for HN rather than flagging the discussion around it. Those two things are different.


Yes, that is minor but still important. Having 3 options: flag submission and flag discussion and flag title might be too much.

That's up to the admins to decide what needs more often to be managed, the submission or the discussion. Or it could be named:

    flag title | flag submission/discussion


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

Wikipedia has enormous meta community, and it's likely that such a huge amount of meta is toxic.


Reminds me a bit of terrible zero-tolerance rules that you see in schools nowadays. It's easier to enforce a "simple policy" with no exceptions than to make judgements, but that doesn't mean it's better.


There are all sorts of things it would be "nicer" to have Paul Graham doing for me for free. Writing fuzzers. Making coffee. Doing laundry.


This re-titling, if I understand correctly, is already a manual process, right?

So this is less "Hey PG, could you wash my dishes and do my laundry" and more "Hey PG, could you please stop loading up my dishwasher with dirty socks?" The labor is already being done, but at least one of the people doing it seems to be doing it in cases where it is detrimental.


Sure, let's go down the analogy rabbit-hole.

It's more like PG agreeing to do your laundry, but under the condition that he will put all colors together, regardless of your wishes, instructions or special sorting of laundry before you give it to him. He's willing to do some work for you, just not as much as you would like. It may even seem like he does more work, when clothes that were pre-sorted into single load sized chunks end up mixed together, but that's his process. If you want sorted laundry, use a different service.

I guess what I should be saying is that this laundry service is ripe for disruption by a more flexible newcomer. But I wouldn't say that, because that would be a low, cheap joke that would prevent me from looking too long at myself in the mirror.


To be clear, my issue is not the HN policy (as far as I understand it). I am 100% A-Okay with HN moderators reverting editorialized titles.

My issue is with the HN moderator[s] who are not using common sense while executing this policy. When an informative title gets changed to an information-free title, it is detrimental to the site. The point of using moderators to do this instead of auto-reverting all titles is so that the moderators can use some judgement. That is great, so long as they actually do that.


There is nobody doing this work for HN that doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt, and then some. HN doesn't have a lot of moderators; it is intimately intertwined with YC the firm (something I've pointed out on HN before). Moderating it is a tricky problem.


I certainly don't mean to imply that any of the moderators have malicious intentions.


This is a great analogy, I will be stealing it and using it regularly. Seriously, well said.


This is an unfair comment. You're essentially turning a healthy, non-personal discussion on how best to evolve HN submission policies into one where its the dissenters vs. PG.

Worse, you then tack on hypothetical (and frankly ridiculous) extensions like making coffee or doing laundry (both are personal tasks with no relevance to the HN community).

I'd like to believe the community is mature enough to debate this issue without having to be subtly threatened with PG's authority.


write a blog post about the story and submit that instead

Well, actually, the guidelines ask us to submit the original. But you can submit the original and link to your blog in the comments.


But that does not fix the stupid title problem the person wanted to fix in first place.


Indeed. You can't fix stupid titles. But if there is a real issue with the title- it's misleading, sexist, or what-have-you, don't fix the title. Write your opinions as a comment or a separate blog post.

The point is- the title isn't important enough to worry about- content is.


But unless you read every article that hits the front page, titles are important.

Titles are how I decide which articles to read, and often the original title doesn't explain why the article should/might be considered interesting by the HN audience.


Holy shit! Now look at this thread! The whole point is, this isn't an important enough issue to worry about. We all have real work to do. And we have people writing their asses off to a reply to a reply...


But the point of getting titles right is to save us from wasting time reading stuff we don't want to when we could be wasting/spending time reading stuff we'd rather.

To my mind a truncated page title taken from the page itself along with a subtitle provided by the submitter and optionally a user selected number of lines from the submission content itself would provided a more useful and informative page for triaging content one wishes to consume/discuss.

However it seems that moderation of titles isn't working so simply reverting to using the given page title created by the content creator is probably the best immediate option.

IMO a site like HN should be highly customisable. If I want page titles and you want the submitters titles and someone else wants only the head lines from the submitters content then why not. If you want votes hidden and I want them visible, why not. If you want votes weighted by longevity of the user and I want votes weighted by people I've upvoted, why not.

But that's not HN and primarily it's the corpus of people here rather than the site that generate the worth.


"write a blog post about the story and submit that instead."

A long comment and a link are probably OK, but if you just want to change the title, you'd probably get accused of blogspam.


I don't know if tpacek meant this instead, but how about writing an article briefly explaining why your title is better and then provide a follow on link to the article.

This has the advantage of getting the right title, getting out a link to the article, and having a quick synopsis of why the title change was made in the first place.


Agreed. It creates a perception gap.


> 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).

Actually, the problem is that they have a recently changed[1] policy that makes no sense whatsoever given the limitations on this site with relation to the nature of media that's being posted. I.e. the fact that submitters cannot post a title and a lede, while the lede on a linked site may add much needed context to an otherwise ambiguous title.

Unfortunately, your head is so far up pg's ass that you were unable to realize this simple fact.

Therefore, you may continue massaging pg's balls.

[1] As recently as last year, this was the policy: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

HN has been around for a while, so many long-time users probably aren't even aware of the change.


username485631 (if that is your real name), nice use of the irony in drawing attention to the "mean and stupid comments" point.


> a horrible half way house

Horrible might be a little strong. "Mildly confusing," or, "suboptimal in certain respects" are more accurate.


I find people who vehemently debate relatively esoteric HN policies like title changes a little odd. In order to function, every ship needs a captain. PG is the captain of this particular ship. If you don't like a policy, you can suggest an improvement and see if he decides if it's worthwhile to make a change. The HN people are always very responsive and thoughtful, so you can't fault them for ignoring their users or making ad-hoc decisions. If you happen not to like the decisions of the captain of this particular ship, you're always welcome to get off at the next port. It's pretty simple, so I really don't understand where the complaints are coming from.


It's not that hard to understand, really. People get passionate about the things they like. They want to see those things be as successful as they possibly can. When they see a decision made that they think will hinder that, they get cranky. But they're only cranky because they care; nobody complains about the policies at a place they never go to, or gripes when a band they don't listen to changes its sound.

In that sense it's a compliment to PG and the admins that people get so worked up about things like this; it shows they've built something people care about.


The easy way to solve this problem would be to add a sub-title field on the submission page. For many submission it could be left blank, but for the ones where the submitter wants to draw attention to something special or non-obvious, like a bug in the submitted page, he could fill out the sub-title.


Agree, this comes down to trust. Trust trust trust. If you don't have infinite time for moderating, paul, open it up to others. In fact I'd love to see a system where people can also vote on titles. Most people (aside from the OP and submitters) hate sensationalized titles and would vote up a better one. I guess Reddit kind of does this by allowing multiple submissions of the same link, but you still get a lot of garbage titles voted up anyway, and by the time the submission makes it to the front page, the title is fixed.


Make a blog post with your custom title, link to the article you were going to submit, add your commentary even more fully, submit your blog post.


People hate that and often call it a link-bait or the top comment ends being "Link to the Original".

But then the top comment on such submissions end up being [Original]: <link>

So it just might work.


I expect you to be shadow banned without reason in 3..2..1...

:D


Hahahaha the part time site admins running this place for free will totally just shadow ban you for saying something they disagree about, funny joke.


Yeah right, there are no incidents of people getting shadow banned due to personal vengeance/ stuff they disagree about, on Hackernews. /s

And 'running it free' is not like they are doing us a favour like you make it out to be, but running it right, is.

And we all know you are one of the good admins here too :) /s


It's not like anyone would know if they did.


Happened to me, more than once.


It just isn't that big of a deal. Either way.


> 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.


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).


> 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.


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.


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


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...


It's also worth noting that when the submitter-editor finds a title that is more significant than the original one, a title that allows some interesting content not to get drowned in the "new" page, does a service to the community.


So important to show versions of edits. Instead of having to argue about which version, we can read every version together and think it out for ourselves.


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.


Yep. There are two separate problems: original titles created with an overly-high amount of concern for people clicking through (linkbait) and original titles created with an overly-low amount of concern for people clicking through (interesting personal blog posts titled "some stuff", for example).

Both of these should be changed to solid, standard news titles that inform the potential reader about the content.

Letting people change titles eliminates both of these problems, at the occasional expense of a crappy title being submitted and promptly flagged down. Graham's solution is worse than the problem it purports to solve.


> 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?


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.


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".


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).


I like this, if there was some way of visually distinguishing submitter addition (make it lighter, italic, etc) so we know if a parenthetical is from the site or from the submitter.


> 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.


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


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.


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.


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.


Or fetch the title, pre-populate the submission form with it, and then upon submit, require a confirmation along the lines of "You've changed the title of this submission. Please note that in general, we want submissions to use the original article's title except in cases where it is necessary to edit, for e.g. reasons of clarification or space. We do not allow editorializing in titles, so if this title edit isn't good, your change will be reverted by a moderator and it will not reflect well on your karma score. Are you sure you want to submit with the edited title?"


This would be IMHO the best solution UX wise.


That's a good idea.


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.


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.


Is it possible to increase the title length, or add how many characters over the current title is. I keep copying submissions into a text editor to edit the title and it would probably easier for folks if the rejection form told how many characters needed to be deleted.


Hey pg, I've often wondered if something similar to this might help with the civility issue.

I'm not thinking blink tag gaudy :) - but seeing an "unmissable" reminder message as you are typing your comment into the textarea would probably be helpful in curbing abuses.


Allow the title field to be blank, in which case the title is auto-fetched. (I just tried leaving the title blank and it barfed at me).

If a custom title is submitted, require an explanation. Possibly display both the custom title and the original title.


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)


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


This looks like a very good solution. If enough users will actually care to vote for the title.


if not many people vote, then there's no problem, right?


maybe


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.)


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.


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.


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?


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.


Having a "flag this title" feature is the best suggestion I've seen so far. If there aren't enough moderators to read articles before reverting titles, then having the community do it makes so much more sense than doing it blindly.

This approach gives intelligent first posters the necessary flexibility to change the title for any of many valid reasons (I still can't believe your comment that they changed the title of that serial killer article, killing one of the most chillingly powerful articles of the last month), yet it prevents first posters from abusing their priority even more effectively than the current approach.


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


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?


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?


I believe people refer to this as blog spam, right? From the HN guidelines: Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.


Right, but the guidelines are developed from people doing undesirable things to the detriment of HN. (Presumably, submitting blog spam and the front page being full of ten blog spam pages that have the same title and all point back to a single source.) If (as the critics suggest) the combination of "submit original source" and "use original title" are making HN worse, we can adjust our behaviour and change the guidelines.

What I'm advocating is that people submit "blog spam" only when:

1. The submitter is absolutely certain that the original source has a title that makes no sense out of context,

2. The submitter wants to editorialize the title because of (1), and,

3. The submitter owns the blog that has the "blog spam" post (i.e. they don't submit blog spam from TechCrunch or Kotaku or what-have-you unless they actually write for TC/Kotaku/etc.)

If a "blog spam" post makes it to the front page way more often than the original source because of editorialized titles, then that is the decision of the collective HN community. I suspect that it rarely will.

As a bonus, if the new approach works well, maybe we can switch to an automated title-scraper.

I agree that there may be a short-term increase in blogspam, but this approach lets the people who are upset about title-changing see for themselves which title was most useful to HN readers. I hypothesize that in the long run, people who write factually incorrect editorialized titles will learn the hard way (because their "blog spam" doesn't get upvoted) and eventually go back to submitting original sources (and maybe they'll stop complaining about title reverts to boot).

And, in either case, this removes the need for mods to revert titles, which (hopefully) is win-win.


I think that this proposal would ultimately be to the detriment of HN. I don't want to have to click through your blog to get to the article, even if you have the purest of intentions and aren't just looking for ad impressions, just because HN moderators cannot be arsed to exercise discretion when re-titling posts.

I want to be able to read a link, get a reasonable impression of what content is behind it and why it was posted, click it once, and then read the content. Anything else is a sub-par user experience.


Fair enough. What do you propose submitters should do if the page's original title doesn't give you a "reasonable impression of what content is behind it"? Simply not submit the article altogether?


I think that submitters should edit titles if they think the original titles are unreasonable. If moderators think that the edited title is unreasonable, they could revert or otherwise change it. Basically, everyone should operate as the rules claim they should operate.

The problem is that moderators semi-regularly edit titles that really didn't have editorial twist to be completely uninformative. As far as I am concerned, there isn't a policy problem, there is a moderator problem.


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.


...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.


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.


This is exactly the approach known as the blogspam :)


Disagree. I think at one point pg suggested it.

The original source idea is about posting a link to slashdot or other aggregator that references a story.

The blog post would be original content.


Many times, the reasonable method of pointing out the part of a story relevant to HN is the exact kind of three sentence note you get on a slashdot story. It's very common to have something you want to show off without also having enough personal opinion to write a full content post yourself.

Is it really original content if my post gives context, and links to the original, and does nothing else?


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.


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


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.


He just explained why. Article postings are community property. The first person to post an article wasn't intended to have a privilege to editorialize or summarize the article.


From the FAQ:

How do I make a link in a question?

You can't. (This is to prevent people from using this method as a way of submitting a link, but with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.)


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.


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.


I think that's covered by the issue of titles being common, not personal. If two people both submit the same story, the first person to submit it should not get extra editorial privileges over later submitters.

I suppose you could have a separate "subtitle" field that anyone can add to, and vote the best/worst like comments, but that seems like more trouble than it's worth.


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).


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).


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.


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"?


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.


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


> 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.


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?


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.


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?


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?


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/ 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.


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).


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.


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...


Exactly.


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.


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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).


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.


> 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.)


AKA how to ensure the hivemind remains strong


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


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.


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.


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.


>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.


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.


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.)


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


You missed an opportunity to push people to the Bookmarklet: http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html Perhaps this would help the issue. Not sure.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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


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


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


Still enough material that nobody smart enough to be involved with HN/YC would want the task of reading the articles just to verify whether the altered title is suitable (remember, the task is to verify the alteration is fair & accurate, not whether you like or agree with it). Would you want that job?


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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."


Makes sense, thanks.


> 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.


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).


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.


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.


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.


[deleted]


Speaking of which, can we talk about some great ideas I have for a new place to store our bicycles?


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.


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?


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.


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!"


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?


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.)


Why not have a submission look like this:

[Submitters reader-enticing paraphrase title]

{Original title, in smaller text/diff font}


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


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


> 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?


Why is there a length limit?


The semantics of using a title kind of dictate that.


I agree 100% with this.


> 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.


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.


Censorship




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