[saurik]

This website has an extremely awkward policy about titles that makes it so if you don't use the original title people get angry. The policy though just doesn't make sense, sadly, as the concept of titles is audience-specific (and even movies or books, which might feel more organized, sometimes have different audiences in different markets). FWIW, I did connect it together as I saw "(signal.org)" and that was sufficient for me in this specific case.

[dang]

It feels like the policy doesn't make sense because people only notice the cases they don't like. The cases where it works just fine, which are the vast majority, go unnoticed. That's by design, because it keeps things relatively smooth and happy, but it has this weird side effect that the annoyance cases build up like mercury in the 'policy' corner of the brain.

Worst yet, the title edits that would annoy people if HN had a different policy (and they would be legion) go uncounted because we don't allow them to happen in the first place. Such a regime would be much less smooth, because for each title edit you (i.e. anyone) happened to agree with, there would be a lot more rubbing you the wrong way.

The fundamental principle here is that on HN, being the one to submit an article confers no special right to interpret or frame it for others. We want the articles to speak for themselves, and we want the front page to be as accurate and neutral as possible ('bookish', to use PG's old word for this). Misleading titles and clickbait titles get in the way of that, so the HN guidelines ask submitters to change those. Otherwise not.

Threads are so sensitive to initial conditions that the power to rewrite a title is literally the power to reframe the entire discussion, and therefore control it. On HN, we want the author of the article (or creator of a project) to have that power, not the submitter. That really is fundamental—it's the reason why HN's front page is the way it is, and therefore the reason why HN is the way it is. To change it would be to mess with the DNA of this place and would soon lead to a completely different forum. Maybe a good forum, but not the kind that HN is trying to be.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[saurik]

(I don't mind if you ignore this and I don't mind if you hide this or whatever. But I have thought about this specific issue in the context of this site quite a bit for almost a full decade now, and I feel like I have something interesting to contribute to your thought process given your response.)

FWIW, I think this is an unfair characterization of my complaint. Yes: I can and would (and once in a blue moon even do) make this complaint "as a user" of Hacker News, and you can certainly claim that I only notice the places where it is bad and am failing to notice all the places where it is good. I assure you: I understand this well enough to make your argument for you against me as a user and I agree we can bicker back and forth about whether this is a good idea without it mattering much. (I do think you are wrong there also, and I think that you are incorrectly associating one property of your platform you are tasked with defending as somehow being center of it, but that is again a separate argument we could have.)

However, what I think you are missing is that, when you are making arguments about content in general across this website and how most cases work, you are doing so from the vantage point of the moderator and have--in my eyes--become blind to the plight of publishers, some of whom run into this policy not every now and then but on every single post they are involved in due to their medium or other constraints of their audience. While on average it is maybe not so harmful, it disproportionately negatively affects some content that the readers of Hacker News do seem to greatly value more than other other content.

If you primarily publish changelogs or summary pieces (both of which can get a lot of play on Hacker News... but only for one subsection, not the whole article), publish to mailing lists or forums (where the titles are often under someone else's control or abnormal to use at all; we see a lot of great content these days on Twitter, and I would use it more often were it not for Hacker News and its title policy), or even technical articles on smaller blogs designed for closed audiences that would find a title for a "general" audience off-putting, you become permanently trapped in what to you is a disregarded corner case.

> On HN, we want the author of the article (or creator of a project) to have that power, not the submitter. That really is fundamental...

I am thereby very glad (though also quite a bit sad) you said this (and might have not bothered to respond had you not, btw), because I am an author making this argument first and foremost on behalf of my work as an author, and I feel this power dynamic issue deeply (on reddit, every now and then someone is egregious with an edit... and sure it might feel to you that that is a problem as you remember when it was a problem, but the vast majority it goes unnoticed ;P). And yet, I claim the policy as used and enforced isn't giving authors the power you might think they are being given, because--as I had indicated--the concept of titles is not anywhere near as well-defined as you make it out to be, and so as an author I think this policy is actually poorly designed.

About a decade ago I seriously got into a (quick, but so very memorable) argument with someone on Hacker News about the title of one of my own articles, one which--in its medium (Google+)--should not actually have a title. The article did have an official title that was used everywhere the article was linked, but it wasn't part of the article due to its medium. I think that was probably the first day I got angry at the policy, and it was "top of mind" as it was itself an article about policies (real name policies) that disproportionately affected certain users but are defended by moderators because it works for the majority... that was itself running into issues on another website due to a different policy with a similar kind of inherent design flaw falling into a similar blind spot (though of course the real name policy is much worse, I do want to make clear; that said, permanent unique user names are almost as bad, and Hacker News has those).

Over the years, then, I came to the point where I actually feel a need to give advice to people publishing content so it can be "Hacker News compatible", and that advice generally harms the person's "usual" audience :(. In particular: you need to publish things only on mediums that support titles (or if you must, add a title; yes: if you publish content on Twitter, if it might get linked by someone to Hacker News, I guess you need to dedicate part of your thread to give the thread a "title"), with "boring titles" for a general audience, with a separate top-level URL for each and every single topic.

BTW: I want to expand on the "boring titles" part of that. The best titles to choose in most contexts--and I am not saying that is true of Hacker News, as that is but one of many venues--are often "editorialized", because they are designed to be catchy and memorable and create a strong hook for the reader, who shares context that you have due to being part of your audience. And yet, Hacker News has a quirk in their policy whereby, if an upstream title is editorialized, then the author suddenly isn't supposed to be given the power. If you were consistent on that front I might find the policy more sympathetic.

As a local politician who pays careful attention to this kind of editorialization, I see this dynamic play out a lot with the local newspaper: the news articles in their print edition have highly editorialized titles designed to even be "misleading", while their online version?... not so much. That is because their audience in the physical paper is different from their audience on their site, the latter of which more often being random people linked to one post. One that was so memorable it has stuck with me for many years: online it said "UCSB Acquires Dublin’s, Precious Slut Property", while the paper copy said "UCSB Buys Precious Slut" (which doesn't even have the same meaning, but we get what they are after and it is funny).

And so after a full decade of dealing with this over and over again, I now find myself thinking about it every single time I publish anything anywhere. And it sucks: I spend most of my time on this website in this community (which I will note I absolutely do not believe is reliant on this policy to function any more than Facebook is reliant on a real name policy), and yet I also resent it deeply due to a rule that--at least in its exact implementation (which I bet could be fixable with minor changes)--almost no one in my circle thinks is a good idea: we just tolerate it because of network effect lock-in. I don't think I have published anything anywhere in the past decade without having to decide how to placate this policy. The best idea I have come up with so far is to use User-Agent detection tricks to give people on Hacker News a different title than anyone else, in my attempt to actually feel like I am in control as the author (which I clearly don't currently feel I have).

[dang]

Thanks for writing this! I don't think we're as far apart as it seems. For example, in cases like this, we often bend the rules, very much for the reasons you mention:

If you primarily publish changelogs or summary pieces (both of which can get a lot of play on Hacker News... but only for one subsection, not the whole article), publish to mailing lists or forums (where the titles are often under someone else's control or abnormal to use at all; we see a lot of great content these days on Twitter, and I would use it more often were it not for Hacker News and its title policy), or even technical articles on smaller blogs designed for closed audiences that would find a title for a "general" audience off-putting, you become permanently trapped in what to you is a disregarded corner case.

We're trying for a global optimization here—interesting content, free of sensationalism to the extent possible. We're not bureaucrats trying to enforce little rules. Always the intent is to be a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place [1]. If you've got content that you feel is great for HN but whose title doesn't fit the cookie cutter, you're always welcome to email us at [e-mail]. Our goal is also for HN to feature the best content, where 'best' means most interesting to the community. (Of course, there's also often a tension between what an author feels is great content vs. what the community (or moderators as a proxy for the community) feel is great content. That aspect is unavoidable, given how scarce frontpage space is.)

It's true that baity titles work better for attracting enough quick upvotes to make HN's front page, but then one of two things typically happens: either readers (who there are far more of) see the bait, go "WTF is this doing on HN" and flag the submission; or, moderators notice the submission, see that the article is good, and replace the title with something more accurate and neutral. That's not such a bad thing in practice. Some good content does surface that way.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[FridayoLeary]

If the original title is too vague, hyperbolic or long, i will use a better title from another website. But normally it's just confusing for people who expect one headline, to find a different one. Generally company blog headlines fall into the category of "extremely vague" and need improving.