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by nagvx 3338 days ago
Why was the title changed? The old title was not great, but at least informed us that a) the article was about PaX/Grsec, and b) was trying to present another side to the story.

HN has replaced this with the title of an obscure Linux project, and an awkward and unhelpful metaphor - capitalisation kept, of course, so readers can wrongly assume that "Ark" is the name some piece of software. Yes, it's original, pure and untouched. No, it's not helpful, it's just worse in every way.

I understand that editorialising titles is a bad thing. But if a human is taking the time to make a judgement call on what is or is not editorialised, why not take a few extra minutes to create a more neutral title?

1 comments

I really agree. Every time I notice that a title has been changed lately, the edited version is always blander, vaguer, and gives less of an idea what the article is about. There's another example on the front page even now ("esoteric programming paradigms").

Whoever edits titles seems to value brevity and neutrality more highly than saying what's in the article, lately.

Indeed, concreteness & specificity > generalness & neutrality in almost all cases of writing and communication. It even makes for more catchy titles, without being clickbaity.