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I wish Hacker News would display both the original title and an editorialised subtitle. The first is important to capture the linked author's intent but the sec

I wish Hacker News would display both the original title and an editorialised subtitle. The first is important to capture the linked author's intent but the second is necessary for actually knowing what the link is about. You can see how it works on the Economist where there are two "titles" for each article, a catchy one and a useful one. e.g. From http://www.economist.com/printedition/2017-02-18 http://www.economist.com/printedition/2017-02-18: Catchy / Useful - Taking the low road / Scotland's economy - Back to the desert / Britain in the Gulf - Still cleaning up the Co-op / Ethical banking - Errant Flynn / Turmoil in the administration - etc

pmoriarty 10y ago
I've always found HN's policy of no editorializing of titles, and their insistence on original titles to be counterproductive. Quite often an excellent article will have a really generic or vague title that few people will ever read, and a judiciously edited title will interest people enough to read it. At that point, upvotes should determine whether the article lives or dies, as usual. If readers don't think the article is worthwhile, they don't have to upvote it. I like your subtitle idea too. It's definitely better than insisting on keeping just the original title. Unfortunately, it will make for some practical difficulties with the layout of HN pages, which will be able to fit fewer articles in the same space, and it will also be problematic with RSS feeds and the like, which will often still display just one title, not a title and subtitle.
- ethbro 10y ago
  HN needs a secondary upvoter system on the displayed title for an article. "Dear Apple" or "Requests regarding XCode and Swift/ObjC" or "Developer tooling in the Apple ecosystem" Uneditorialized titles also encourages marketing via title wording. But in general, isn't this the Facebook "link as it is" vs "how would be objectively and fairly make links better" debate?

pmoriarty 10y ago

I've always found HN's policy of no editorializing of titles, and their insistence on original titles to be counterproductive. Quite often an excellent article will have a really generic or vague title that few people will ever read, and a judiciously edited title will interest people enough to read it. At that point, upvotes should determine whether the article lives or dies, as usual. If readers don't think the article is worthwhile, they don't have to upvote it. I like your subtitle idea too. It's definitely better than insisting on keeping just the original title. Unfortunately, it will make for some practical difficulties with the layout of HN pages, which will be able to fit fewer articles in the same space, and it will also be problematic with RSS feeds and the like, which will often still display just one title, not a title and subtitle.

ethbro 10y ago
HN needs a secondary upvoter system on the displayed title for an article. "Dear Apple" or "Requests regarding XCode and Swift/ObjC" or "Developer tooling in the Apple ecosystem" Uneditorialized titles also encourages marketing via title wording. But in general, isn't this the Facebook "link as it is" vs "how would be objectively and fairly make links better" debate?