41–50 of 50 posts
On reflection, it was quite clearly a spin and I could have made that title much better. The mods are generally looking out for the community and trying to keep titles as representative of the as possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember this one. I deliberately didn't click on that story or upvote it, because I though it was a linkbaity article - what was the f'ing submitter thinking? I have to click on that link to see if it's something even remotely interesting (and presumably profit such a nasty submitter by more ad-views)? No, thank you. After a day, I thought maybe it's something really cool that's got so much upvotes and then clicke…
>and was literally blown away Where did you end up? Did you land on something soft?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If curators are going to do that kind of thing, they should at least sign their edits to take accountability for them. // Yes, it's very rude to alter someone else's text without claiming 'credit' for doing so or referring the edits back to be accepted by the attributed author. FWIW it's also an infringement of the moral rights enshrined within copyright law. You can't modify someone else's work without a license t…
While it is true that comment submissions to HN give an implied license for HN to post the content, with copyright being held by the submitter, you can't copyright names, titles, or short phrases (see, e.g., the 6th entry down in this FAQ section from the Copyright Office - http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html ). Because of this, there is no license needed to amend a title to an article as no one owns r…
That's not quite true.
The "title" of a submission is part of the submission the submission itself being the work. As long as the work is sufficiently substantive then copyright will protect it as a whole.
The linked document refers to things like the title of a book wherein you wish to use the title separately to refer to the work. An author can't claim that you infringed their copyright simply because you referred to their work. This is not the situation at hand. HN is not merely using the title it is altering it and presenting it as the substantial part of the complete work that it indeed is. If you think about it you'll see how untenable your limited interpretation is, under your interpretation I can take a Harry Potter work and retitle it and add my name as author because all I've altered is the title and name ... to recap it is a particular use of the title that your link refers to and not to modifying without license.
Now, arguably in the listings of stories HN could write a new title but on the page when presenting the submitted work they would still lack license to present the work modified (ie with their title).
HN should either reject the work as a submission, retract the work or seek a license to modify it. The simplest thing would be to just add some boilerplate that says "by submitting content we reserve the right to alter it for editorial purposes". Though it would be nice to allow the user to choose to retract the story or allow it as edited.
There may well be a fair use argument for content created in the USA. I doubt there is for content created by European users.²
FWIW altering a title could also cause defamation or be an act of libel but such situations are relatively unlikely. Modification of a substantial part of a copyright work without a license is infringing already. IANA(IP)L but arguing that a HN submission¹ is a work for copyright purposes seems pretty straight forward.
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¹ that's not machine generated or particular short so as to lack discreteness or substance enough to qualify for being a work.
² I've not seen enough case law on internet content to determine how location of created content is judged; is content created via your form considered to be created where I am, where your company resides, where your servers are or what.
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>and was literally blown away Where did you end up? Did you land on something soft?
Literally is literally an auto-antonym used to emphasise a figurative expression. But you win the Grandma Nazi of the Thread award. (!!)
Kinda funny how no moderators have responded... makes me uncomfortable that this community seems to be arbitrarily moderated by invisible people.
That's all I see, though -- and I agree, I was expecting to see a conversation that doesn't seem to be happening.
Well, hopefully the mods are listening and will be more cautious in their future edits....
I submitted a link with the title: 'Linus to Nvidia: "Fuck You"', which was changed to: 'Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds'
My original title was much more accurate (especially since I linked to a specific part of the video).
Yes, it's aggravating. In an ideal world there would be a comment and explanation, but since this would often end up derailing the subject of the pos into a discussion about moderation, I suggest mods just abstain from doing it or else send a note to the poster. When I rewrite the title of an article I do so with a view to making it more accessible to HN readers.
Mods should obviously, as a rule, own up to whatever they moderate. I've seen many a forum go down in flames because of "invisible modding". You almost can't blame them, it's human nature that great power wielded anonymously will end up being abused.
So, the obvious solution is to fix the software to display "edited by ..." whenever someone edits something. I say "fix", because it's almost a bug. All popular forum software has this feature, and there are almost no good reasons not to enable it.
Failing that, mods can easily start taking this matter in their own hands by simply adopting the habit of appending a short tag to whatever got edited, for instance {ani} in your case (or soemthing like that).
Pretty sad this post itself has been made dead actually.
The article was originally called Better disagreement. I chose to call my submission 'How to Disagree' on Steroids: DH7. Someone later changed it back to the article's title.
You could say my title had an editorial spin (I'm looking at 'Steroids'), but I resent the edit for not even keeping the explicit reference to DH7 and PG's article.
I have chosen this title because I assumed most of HN knows about PG's article. This submission is essentially a rehash, and therefore not interesting HN material (better link to PG's article). Except for the DH7 part, which was original. By changing the title, I hoped to tell readers about that, so they don't lose time, nor stop reading before even reaching DH7.
I also hoped a karma boost from this submission, but the title edit (which I think was responsible for the lack of upvotes) quickly squashed that hope. Which is the real reason I was pissed off, I must admit. Plus, the moderators cannot take the time to ponder every fishy title. I stand by the rationalization above however: the best HN title possible certainly was not Better disagreement. That title was meant for LessWrong, not HN.