Except when they consider the original title "click baity" and change that too.
I've given up on trying to come up with what I think is the most useful title to HN though, or on trying to guess what the mods will do. I just use the original title and let the mods change it if they want. If I think the original title isn't good at explaining the main point of interest from a HN view, I feel sad, but oh well, that's clearly how HN wants it.
It might be convenient if HN had a tool like reddit to automatically fetch the title from HTML given a URL. In fact, if they had such a tool, I'd expect HN to maybe actually mandatorily make that the title and not allow you to edit it, since it seems to be HN editorial preferences not to let submitters write titles.
> Except when they consider the original title "click baity" and change that too.
The HN guidelines (edit: which are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and linked at the bottom of every page) say not to use the original title when it is misleading or linkbait. How could that be clearer?
Do we judge every case correctly? Good lord no. That's why we change things when people point out our mistakes. The community contribution here is considerable, so the best way to complain about a title is to suggest a better one.
The guideline also explains why titles can't be automated in the way you suggest: the software would have to identify what is misleading or linkbait. If anyone can show us such software, believe me, no one would use it more eagerly.
My opinion on what is linkbait or misleading is often not the same as yours. But that's fine, that's why you're the mods.
My titles have been changed so many times (in both directions), that I just decided to always use the original title, and let you do your mod job and change it according to your judgement.
Do the HN guidelines also say to always use the original title unless it's misleading or linkbait too? I hadn't actually been aware of that -- where do I find these guidelines? I'm not actually sure. If I had known that, it would have spared my energy in coming with titles I thought were more informative only to have them, as a rule, changed back.
Thanks for your work!
I just found the Hacker News Guidelines you mention by googling -- previously I hadn't been aware they even existed, so didn't know to look for them. I see they do say to ordinarily prefer the original title. I am not sure how people find out about these guidelines, are they linked to from somewhere on HN that I'm missing? It might make a lot of sense to include a link to them on the 'submit' form.
The guidelines are linked on the bottom of every single page of HN (edit: except the submission page itself!) but I guess that's the part that nobody reads. Maybe they should be more prominent in the submission flow.
I've given up on trying to come up with what I think is the most useful title to HN though, or on trying to guess what the mods will do. I just use the original title and let the mods change it if they want. If I think the original title isn't good at explaining the main point of interest from a HN view, I feel sad, but oh well, that's clearly how HN wants it.
I'm glad HN is like this. It's one of the reasons I enjoy the website.
It might be convenient if HN had a tool like reddit to automatically fetch the title from HTML given a URL. In fact, if they had such a tool, I'd expect HN to maybe actually mandatorily make that the title and not allow you to edit it, since it seems to be HN editorial preferences not to let submitters write titles.
This was tried, I think. It was proven to be a bad idea in practice. If you think the complaints about titles were bad now, you should've seen them when the software did automated reversions. At least, I think they were automated reversions.
Sometimes the subtitle is a better title. Sometimes the original title is clickbaity, as you said. Regardless, it takes a person to moderate the titles.
I've given up on trying to come up with what I think is the most useful title to HN though, or on trying to guess what the mods will do. I just use the original title and let the mods change it if they want. If I think the original title isn't good at explaining the main point of interest from a HN view, I feel sad, but oh well, that's clearly how HN wants it.
It might be convenient if HN had a tool like reddit to automatically fetch the title from HTML given a URL. In fact, if they had such a tool, I'd expect HN to maybe actually mandatorily make that the title and not allow you to edit it, since it seems to be HN editorial preferences not to let submitters write titles.