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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.