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Moderators of HN: please stop changing post titles

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Moderators of HN: please stop changing post titles

#1
I would ask that the unknown mysterious moderators of this site stop changing post titles long after they hit the front page.

The guidelines at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html state: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it." but this should not apply just because the title submitted does not match the article. When the actual article's title makes no sense or provides no context, it should be allowed to stay changed.

A story is currently on the front page with a title of "Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots" which was just changed from its previously edited title of something about visualization.

"Where the Heat and Thunder Hit Their Shots", while actually the title of the article, says absolutely nothing about the content of the article. Is this an article about weather? Photography? Nope, it's about basketball. Why is it on Hacker News? Oh, the submitter liked the visualizations, which is exactly what the previously edited title said before it was changed.

Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875857 was a story about Light Table and the title was edited to reflect that until it had at least 100 points. Then a moderator changed it to the story's actual title of "On concepts and realities" which said absolutely nothing about it and probably caused lots of people that had already visited the link once to read it and think it was something else.

Moderators, please stop doing this.

Re: Moderators of HN: please stop changing post titles

#7
On occasion, I have experienced my submitted headlines being reverted back to the original source's obscure headline. More often than not these obscure headlines were made for a print newspaper or magazine where the lede (which HN readers can't see unless they click through) explains the story.

In addition, the 80-character limit sometimes makes it difficult to include the original headline for some of the more wordy publications. This forces rewriting.

I remember HN submissions used to allow headlines that were 90 or even 100 characters long. Why not bring back these limits?

Re: Moderators of HN: please stop changing post titles

#8
I can give an example of a title change AWAY from the original article title. I was quite puzzled by that when it happened, and I've never heard an explanation of why it happened. I heard about an article from a researcher on human genetics who was writing to other human genetics researchers on an email list. I meet many of those researchers in person in a local "journal club." The researcher was asking for responses from his colleagues about the article, and I thought the article was interesting enough to bring up here on Hacker News. My submission of the article here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270

was under the original article title, namely "23andMe disproves its own business model." The ensuing Hacker News discussion had several commenters (who apparently had paid their hard-earned money for the services of the 23andMe company) complaining about the title, which I didn't editorialize or spin in any way. I agree that the article was controversial, but a legitimate researcher in the field thought that it was a worthwhile read, which is the only reason I submitted the article to HN. After I no longer had my edit window for the submission title, some anonymous person with title-editing power changed the title to "23andMe finds Parkinsons only 24% heritable" (which is a title that reveals considerable ignorance about human genetics, and doesn't fairly represent the content of the submitted article). As I post this, the original article is not showing up to me by following the original link, but Google's cache

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

confirms the original article title.

I can bear with curators here changing article titles to original article titles (or to titles that condense original article titles to less than 90 characters, which is the hard-coded length limit here), but I sure would like an explanation of what a user is to do if it's possible to submit an article with EXACTLY the original article title (my usual practice) and then have the title changed to a stupid-looking title that is still under my screen name. If curators are going to do that kind of thing, they should at least sign their edits to take accountability for them. (That is the usual practice in another online forum where I have editing powers on other people's posts, where I use this same screen name I use here. If I edit someone's submission title, an edit trail identifies that I did that.)

Re: Moderators of HN: please stop changing post titles

#9
probably caused lots of people that had already visited the link once to read it and think it was something else.

Many times have I been looking for an article I read previously and cannot find it. It's a combination of headline editing, a really poor search engine, and the way things fall off the front page mix with things that haven't hit the front page yet.

Re: Moderators of HN: please stop changing post titles

#10
Completely agree. It bit me once: I submitted a link to a free epub book (hosted on GitHub), titled

    Backbone.js Fundamentals [free ebook, epub]
(here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831954)

it surprisingly made it to the front page (250 votes), but soon a mod changed the title to

    Backbone.js Fundamentals
So, a lot of unsuspecting visitors (my guess is about 25000 - my personal experience tells me most front page links get 100x visits more than their votes) clicked on this link, expecting to see a web page but end up downloading a random epub. Very soon the poor guy's GitHub account was suspended temporarily due to excessive bandwidth usage.

I felt very bad and angry at the time.

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