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.
Backbone.js Fundamentals [free ebook, epub]
it surprisingly made it to the front page (250 votes), but soon a mod changed the title to
Backbone.js Fundamentals
I felt very bad and angry at the time.
"Lights -- impressive html5 / webgl presentation built with threejs"
to:
"Lights"
After a day, I thought maybe it's something really cool that's got so much upvotes and then clicked on it and was literally blown away.
Where did you end up? Did you land on something soft?
Analyzing the MD5 collision in Flame (Alexander Sotirov's Summercon Slides)
I thought it was useful/informative to include Sotirov's name in order to lend credibility to the analysis. I did not link directly to the pdf, however in the spirit of the submission guidelines I thought it would be appropriate to include that the main body of the link were slides from Summercon. It was changed to:
Analyzing the MD5 collision in Flame
It is not apparent to me why the title was changed. In my opinion the changed title was less informative to the reader and the original title did not include any spin/hyperbole/offensive material. Mainly I am just curious as to why the title was changed. I think it would be helpful if the moderators would post a comment when a title was changed. This would help inform the community about when a title is changed and educate us about what is and what is not proper. In the long run I think this would help make the moderators job easier...
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.)
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 to do so (generally); I couldn't find any reference to such a license term in the YC site details. Without such a license a posted story that the moderators dislike [is it just pg?] should just be deleted, the site clearly has no duty to carry the story (by which I mean title and strap linking to the original article) but it also appears to lack any license to amend said submissions.
That said, I once had a legal submission amended to a title that was really wrong legally and therefore sympathize with the sentiments expressed by tokenadult. It is one thing to clarify or to trim fluff from a title but it is another to guess at what a better title might be for a technical area that is beyond the expertise of a moderator. Hence, caution ought to be used. On balance, though, I have found the moderators to be thoughtful when they do make such changes and so I am sure this is just one of the hazards of trying to monitor a site that can include complex materials from varying sources.
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.
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?
-<td><input type="text" name="t" size="50"></td>
+<td><input type="text" name="t" size="80"></td>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).
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....
Often a title, original or otherwise, simply doesn't provide sufficient context to clearly explain a link. A few well-chosen words of prose could help here (more so if the text could be editied / modified while the post was sitting in queue). Gameable? Perhaps, but we can vote down / flag in that instance.
"Heat & Thunder" was pretty non-obvious to me, and until I read the comment here about the data visualization, struck me as particularly non-interesting.
I end up not submitting most of the long-form or academic things I think HN readers might find interesting as a result, since just from the headline probably nobody will know why it was submitted or why they should care. Sometimes if I think something is really good I'll make an exception and submit, followed by posting a comment explaining why I thought the submission was interesting. That occasionally works, but I think most people don't click through to comments on the New page.
I'm not really blaming the readers, because I find the same problem browsing the New page myself: in this list of cryptic headlines, the only thing that stands out are controversy-type headlines ("Why you should never X"), and the rest is hard to skim.
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).
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.
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.
Pretty sad this post itself has been made dead actually.
You should only change titles if the title doesn't even remotely match up with the content. e.g. Title: Heat win championship / Content: Thunder win championship
At the same time, I think the title-editing as actually practiced is great. I'm pleased with the results whenever I notice the changes. (Which is usually after someone gives good reason for the changes).
This is perfect and in line with the reason we're allowed to edit our own submissions for a while. It's basic tweaking to make things fair and accurate, instead of link-baity and sensational.
I can give one personal example.
In hindsight (past few weeks' performance) the original title was right and I was wrong, but I complained about the title here or another story: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3993657
Basically, I complained that it used the word "barely above its opening price" (or another, similar word like "barely"), which I thought unfair, since 23 cents of gains in a day is perfectly normal and if sustained would be a good trend forever.
The title was changed. (In hindsight, the negative title was justified, and my complaint was out of place.)
This is a place where we are a tight community that can do things like accuse each other of stabbing one another in the back, or stealing each others' text or ideas, or whatever. People upvote. THe story comes out. Responses are written. Soon enough we know if the original, sensational title is justified or needs to be toned down either a little or quite a bit.
On the whole I think the moderators do an excellent job on the titles and it serves a really important purpose. I'm not sure how to fix the other complaints mentioned here. (Maybe put a history in there for search engines or if people want to know how it was submitted).
I know I much prefer this to the broken titles that slashdot users had to put up with (even after complaints) back when that site still had a readership... proactive is much better here.