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by RivieraKid 2360 days ago
Yes, this is a real problem, verbatim titles are often far from the "optimal" title. In some cases the original title provides almost no information about the content.

The question is what's better than a strict "no editorialization" rule.
1 comments
Lammy 2359 days ago
The exact guideline is "If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link", and I think that wording speaks from an outdated mindset where every submission is a standalone web page that _has_ a title, for one thing. This submission is a web page with its own title, of course, but that makes it sound like the guideline hasn't been rethought in too-long of a time.

For a contrived example of how dated the guideline seems, what if somebody submitted a tweet thread criticizing Twitter the company with a headline/sitebit like "Twitter now banning third-party clients. (twitter.com)". Would it have to be renamed to "Now banning third-party clients. (twitter.com)"? That would make it appear to be a more official statement instead of an unsponsored opinion.

I'm picking on Twitter out of recent memory of this submission of mine a couple weeks ago, where the submission title "Tracking down the true origin of a font used in many games and shareware titles" was 100% my own editorializing for lack of title-worthy material in the linked tweet itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667238

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bscphil 2358 days ago
> The exact guideline is "If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link", and I think that wording speaks from an outdated mindset where every submission is a standalone web page that _has_ a title, for one thing.

I suspect the original intent of the rule was to get rid of pointless redundancy in the title. "The 10 craziest things you don't know about X - clickbait.com" is the sort of thing you see very often in the <title> element, but it adds no new information. Actually, you'll notice even Hacker News posts have " | Hacker News" appended to them.

In an article about Arch Linux, the text "Arch Linux" is much less likely to be redundant than an article about something else that just happens to be on the archlinux.org domain.

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