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#2I will just quote what I said a few days ago:
It's worse than that. Since you can't editorialize titles and some authors like to give their articles poetic, meaningless names like "A butterfly in the sky," when the actual article talks about a security exploit in Bitcoin, coded in Go and released by Wikileaks.
I often find myself ignoring interesting articles on HN only to go read them later on reddit with a much more descriptive, editorialized headline.
Right now there's a good example of this problem on the front page. The article about the Android/PRNG security flaw is aptly editorialized as "Google confirms Java and OpenSSL crypto PRNG on Android are broken," but the original article is titled "Some SecureRandom Thoughts," which is meaningless and I would never have clicked it under any circumstances. Thankfully the mods left this one alone.
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#3This title manipulation is the reason I abandoned my real account on HN. I just don't want that someone else change what I wrote while keeping my name on it.
I won't go as far as accusing HN for impersonation (if that's the name), but please, if you change original title, at least remove original submitter name.
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#4There's a guideline that you're not supposed to editorialise titles. When an editorialised title is detected, it is usually corrected.
I happen to disagree with this policy and I think it's a somewhat overly rigid application of the guidelines. However, this is why it's happening, and it makes some sense from at least one perspective. And, after all, this is entirely pg's call to make.
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#5You can make some very small changes to titles. Thus, if you had used
Vulnerability in {windows} ICMPv6 could allow Denial of Service (microsoft.com) 15 points by vog 7 hours ago | 11 comments
I agree that it's a problem when the original title is lousy. Or when the original title is both lousy and longer than 80 chars.
> Result: I have never entered that crappy title, but receive the complaints!
It's frustrating that so many people made those comments - it's pretty obvious that an article from MS is going to be talking about how MS does stuff. If it helps I don't think the complaints are about you, but about MS. Because, you know, there are some companies which provoke that kind of reaction.
I agree that sometimes titles are changed to things that make no sense. That seems to be the rule, and it's consistently applied. That means that people do make comments about the title. This seems to work against PG's desire to avoid the "middlebrow dismissal".
As an aside: I'd love a plugin that helped with the text box. Something that highlighted 80 chars.
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#6This question gets asked every few weeks.
The mods change titles. This is mostly to try to normalize posts, so things with super linkbait titles don't always do well, and things with terrible titles don't always do poorly.
You are copying and pasting a link into a box and writing a few words. You are not doing real work. How the post does should be relevant to its content, not the few words you typed into the box.
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#7You can make some very small changes to titles. Thus, if you had used Vulnerability in {windows} ICMPv6 could allow Denial of Service (microsoft.com) 15 points by vog 7 hours ago | 11 comments You'd have stuck with the original title, and provided the needed extra information. I agree that it's a problem when the original title is lousy. Or when the original title is both lousy and longer than 80 chars. > Result: I h…
> it's pretty obvious that an article from MS is going to be talking about how MS does stuff
No it isn't. To quote one of the complaining comments:
| Sure it links to a Microsoft.com domain, but there are plenty of research projects hosted by Microsoft that are not necessarily on Windows
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#8You can make some very small changes to titles. Thus, if you had used Vulnerability in {windows} ICMPv6 could allow Denial of Service (microsoft.com) 15 points by vog 7 hours ago | 11 comments You'd have stuck with the original title, and provided the needed extra information. I agree that it's a problem when the original title is lousy. Or when the original title is both lousy and longer than 80 chars. > Result: I h…
> it's pretty obvious that an article from MS is going to be talking about how MS does stuff
Ever heard of research.microsoft.com?
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#9The problem is not that titles are edited, but that such edits are not indicated in any way, effectively putting someone else's words in submitter's mouth.
It is simply unacceptable.
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#10This question gets asked every few weeks. The mods change titles. This is mostly to try to normalize posts, so things with super linkbait titles don't always do well, and things with terrible titles don't always do poorly. You are copying and pasting a link into a box and writing a few words. You are not doing real work. How the post does should be relevant to its content, not the few words you typed into the box.
> "This is mostly to try to normalize posts, so things with super linkbait titles don't always do well, and things with terrible titles don't always do poorly."
I don't get this impression. If anything, I've found that original article titles are far more likely to be link-baity than editorialized versions. In addition, It's rare that I've seen a bad article title improved the way you're suggesting.
If anything, I've had the impression that this system is somewhat automated and original article titles are used if they differ significantly from the title submitted (triggered after some threshold).