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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 hn@ycombinator.com. 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... |