Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by superwayne 2525 days ago
The new title (EDIT: "Issue: find a new home for repos") seems pretty generic to me, though. If I didn't open the story while it had the old title I would have probably missed it.

Edit note: At the time of writing, the article title did not include "Requests".

1 comments

You're right, but from our perspective that's a feature not a bug. This story isn't lacking for attention. In cases of hot controversy, it's good to add a little resistance to the circuit. When a title doesn't immediately give away its meaning, it takes a bit more energy to 'overcome'. That energy needs to come from curiosity ("I wonder what that is?"), which is the circuitry we're hoping to activate here. Compare that feeling to "ooh, new development in hot topic X!" which is how one feels when a headline grabs attention and links it directly to something already charged in the mind. It may be a subtle difference, but these tiny initial conditions seem to have the largest effect on how a thread develops. This is related to the principle that on HN, it's good for users to have to work a little. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...