[snewman]

It's a tradeoff.

In my view, the primary function of the title is to help a viewer understand whether the topic is of interest to them and therefore it is worthwhile to click the link. A more-informative title will better serve this critical function.

If some HN participants are prone to making off-base comments based solely on a title, let's address that directly (e.g. via guidelines + voting), rather than by nerfing the titles. Otherwise we're just throwing up our hands and saying "this is why we can't have nice things". I'd rather work toward having the nice things.

Incidentally, it's not just (or even primarily) about length; an article's "native" title often makes sense only in local context, and thus does not communicate well when seen out-of-context on the HN front page.

[sillysaurusx]

It’s good to make HN users dig for information. HN is designed to gratify intellectual curiosity; it’s the same reason TL;DRs are tolerated but discouraged. Dan has written about this many times over many years — I imagine he might drop by with a few persuasive references.

You’re right, by the way. It would be good if HN was designed solely for growth. It might even have been good in this one case, too. But it’s designed to spark curiosity, which is a much more delicate thing. Most long titles are long because they’re noisy. They don’t usually add precision.

[snewman]

I'm honestly baffled by this argument. Do you click through 100% of the links that reach the front page? More to the point, do you expect/desire that most HN readers should do so? Presumably not; so, we must expect that readers -- no matter how curious -- are exercising some decision algorithm. Why deliberately cripple the input to that algorithm? Shouldn't we trust readers to exercise curiosity even when provided with a good descriptive title?

[sillysaurusx]

It's fine to be baffled. For what it's worth, I was also skeptical for a long time.

Mistaken titles should be corrected. Clickbait titles should be reduced. But that's not what's being argued here.

What's being proposed is to change a longstanding community rule. Such things are known to happen, but you have to be careful about doing so. It's almost irresistible to propose changes. I recently proposed one too: that all links in selfposts should be clickable. I still feel that was a decent suggestion.

But we don't have the experience or the information to see all the possible implications of such proposals. Having been on Ye Olde HN for... 2021 minus 2007 years, I think the central question is whether the rule breaks down at scale. Because the title length in place since 2007, and the only reason to change it is that it no longer works, presumably due to HN scaling.

My skepticism alarms go off at such proposals. The clickable links in selfposts are a decent example of a proposal that seems to fit: no one had clickable links in 2007, even for posts from YC. But as HN scaled, that changed. Presently, most posts that make it to the front page get clickable links, so those that don't feel like obvious outliers – the shunned posts. Why not let everyone participate in a fair way?

The title length proposal is different. It's true that it might make some posts more accurate, like this one. But it's also true that a sufficiently creative person can pack a lot of information into 80 characters. Are you sure it's a good idea to change such a longstanding rule, especially when there's no pressing need to do so? Doing nothing is often the best course of action when running something – look how freenode turned out.

The point is, each proposal like this needs to be carefully thought through. It might seem entirely obvious that it's a good idea, much like the selfpost proposal seems like a good idea to me. But we should try to feel skeptical – how much money would you wager that your proposal won't go wrong? Would you place 450k on it? I wouldn't.

But we're asking them to bet far more than $50k on each change like this, because HN is literally the key to YC's power. It always has been. That's why I'm not too bothered if things stay mostly the same – there have been a lot of changes since 2007, but the substance of the site (such as the 30 link limit on the front page) has remained the same.

In fact, one could ask oneself "Why not show more links on the front page? After all, 40 would be more informative than 30." Many of your same arguments would apply. Yet there are subtle but important reasons not to.