Note that not all title changes are mod edits. They could be from the original submitter.
Only within the first ~10 minutes post-submission
The edit window is usually 2 hours.
Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
You aren’t alone. I’ve noticed a major uptick in these types of editorial changes that remove or obscure the intent of the underlying content. They don’t seem to follow a consistent editorial standard or voice, and are having a noticeable effect on the quality of the HN UX.
Do we know who is doing these edits and why?
It could be the submitter, the software, or the mods. For example, the submitter did this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29879165
but the mods did this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29879184
Peter's tool doesn't tend to pick up software edits because most of those happen on submission, which is before the tool picks them up.
Re: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
#23This is probably just evidence that I care about something unimportant, but sharing this after noticing a diminishing change today: In first, US surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient ↓ U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient in reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882912
I like the latter title better; I can understand the editorial stance because “first” does sound a bit click bait like.
And that's the problem: it's an editorial stand that finds the thought offensive that any news headline is ever clicked on. So it removes anything that makes it sound "too interesting" even if it happens to also be an accurate statement.
In the case of the pig's heart, there is no doubt that it is the first such transplant. Arguably, people know as much and it doesn't need to be pointed out. But it's borderline and with a bit of appreciation of the fact that headlines are creative works just as much as the text, I'd argue for a bit more deference to the people who have probably put a lot more thought into the headline.
Re: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
#24Why doesn't HN have an auto-title suggester that si ply pulls in the title of the target URL? Would save a lot of heartache.
Bookmarklet in Safari:
javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title)
Re: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
#25Re: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
#26It looks like the mods are sticklers for capitalization. I’m looking forward to seeing this post’s title edited.
It is what Y Combinator is about after all.
Re: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
#27A filter at the top for common changes would be nice to have. Maybe one for case changes, and year additions.
Re: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
#28It looks like the mods are sticklers for capitalization. I’m looking forward to seeing this post’s title edited.
One could add "(2019)" to the end of it.
Perhaps a bothersome aspect of title changes is we are not told the reason(s) behind the edits. For example, if an HN reader is emailing the moderator and asking them to change a title, other readers might want to know that, along with knowing what was the original title. Whereas if it is a small correction, like adding "(2019)" to the end, perhaps few readers would really care. Sometimes we can decipher the reason, other times not.
Another bothersome aspect might be the arbitrtary applicaton of title changes. Some titles get changed based on some discernible criteria while others do not despite meeting the same criteria.
It is quite common for HN titles that exactly match the submitted web page's to be subsequently changed to something else after submission, even though HN guidelines state that titles should not be editorialised.
Re: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
#29It looks like the mods are sticklers for capitalization. I’m looking forward to seeing this post’s title edited.
One could add "(2019)" to the end of it. Perhaps a bothersome aspect of title changes is we are not told the reason(s) behind the edits. For example, if an HN reader is emailing the moderator and asking them to change a title, other readers might want to know that, along with knowing what was the original title. Whereas if it is a small correction, like adding "(2019)" to the end, perhaps few readers would really car…
Ultimately, the title rules cannot be coded into programming logic and fully documented; they’re a mix of predictable (No Studly Caps) algorithms, submitter’s edits, and moderator’s edits. Human judgment calls are expected - for example, titles should be edited to be succinct when necessary, but never to present the submitter’s opinion. Criteria will not always be applied consistently, each submitter and moderator is a different person, and not everything is seen and fixed when it’s slightly or greatly wrong.
Re: Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
#30Why doesn't HN have an auto-title suggester that si ply pulls in the title of the target URL? Would save a lot of heartache.
There's no "the title" - there are lots of choices, including the HTML doc title, the URL itself (which sometimes-has-a-hyphenated-title-like-this), headings on the page. None is reliably the best choice, and all of them are frequently crap; frequently enough that it wouldn't make sense to have any of them be an official suggestion.
You're not wrong. I've seen subreddits do it though and it worked really well. You can always alter the "suggestion" before submitting