Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dang 300 days ago
Oof that title. Particularly when the site design is so substantive!

I've edited it to use what I think is representative language from the article itself. (This is to allow it to spend more time on HN's frontpage, because the article itself deserves it.)
2 comments
lemonlym 300 days ago
Hey, thanks for this! Prompted me to take a look at the HN guidelines :).
link
editorializing 299 days ago
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

You seem to be editorializing because of your bias and financial interest in YC. "No one is talking about" is an idiom you allow onto the front page relatively frequently (check Algolia), and you allow speculation pointing up for industry trends.

link
dang 299 days ago
The key word in your post is "seem". Not possible to argue against that! But we can look at data here, at least:

> "No one is talking about" is an idiom you allow onto the front page relatively frequently

I just went through all cases of this since April 2014, when we started logging these things. During that time, only two such titles spent more than an hour on HN's front page.

In one of those two cases, we edited the title to make it less baity: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967472 - Nov 2020. (Submitted title was "The tech antitrust problem no one is talking about".)

You have to go back to June 2015 to find a "no one is talking about" which spent more than an hour on HN's frontpage without getting mod-edited: How for-profit prisons have become the biggest lobby no one is talking about - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749393 - June 2015. (Still not sure how I would edit that one.)

In all other cases, mods either edited out "no one is talking about", or users flagged it off the front page so quickly that mods probably never saw it. That happened 3 times, btw; here they are if anyone is curious:

The Internet's Time Is Flawed–Why No One Is Talking About It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43054616 - Feb 2025 (23 minutes on the frontpage)

Browser Permissions on Android: What No One Is Talking About - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23556055 - June 2020 (38 minutes on the frontpage)

The Crisis No One Is Talking About - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17175969 - May 2018 (14 minutes on the frontpage)

Over this time period (i.e. since April 2014), users submitted 4.3M articles to HN. Of those, 392k appeared on the front page. Everyone can decide for themselves what counts as "relatively frequent", but to my mind, 1 or 2 cases (or 5 if you really want to stretch it) out of 392k titles over 11 years doesn't clear that bar.

link