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).
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.)
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.)