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by lisper 4689 days ago
When I clicked on this link the anchor text was "Why Silicon Valley will never beat Hollywood" (or something like that). When I came back, it had changed to "You have to beat the man to be the man," which is the title of the piece. But IMHO the original title (presumably the one written by the submitter) was much better and more descriptive. I don't think I would have clicked on this link with the current title.

There seems to be a lot of this headline-rewriting going on on HN nowadays. IMO it's going a little too far.

3 comments

Also, the title on the front page is different from the title in the comments. I don't think I've seen this before, but maybe I'm just not very observant.

edit: They're the same now. Confused.

Hey, just came back to hacker news and noticed the change as well. Very confused as I didn't edit the title after I had posted it.
Agreed. With the current title it was a fluke that I clicked the link despite it being a topic I'm extremely interested in.
"Why Silicon Valley will never beat Hollywood" inaccurately summarized the piece (see the bottom of the article, where the author says the industry could go either way).

Also, IMO, having inflammatory titles beginning with "Why..." is way too common on HN and is way more of an annoyance than headline-rewriting.

So change it to "Why Silicon Valley may have a hard time beating Hollywood" or something like that if you really want to be that anal about accurate summarization. But the current title tells me absolutely nothing about what the article is actually about.
Agreed, the first title, even partially wrong had at least some information.
Yeah, but I think that's more of an issue with the original article title, which matches the HN title