7 ms·

Once again, the policy on headline titles for articles on HackerNews is a bit bizarre. The original title explained that the man almost died. This current title

Once again, the policy on headline titles for articles on HackerNews is a bit bizarre. The original title explained that the man almost died. This current title is "The Other Half" and does not explain anything at all. As a practical matter, the policy seems to amount to "We use the title of the original article, unless it is strongly stated, in which case we regard it as clickbait and change it to something dull." That is not a good policy, since we should all hope for and promote strong writing, and the fact that a strong headline could be confused for clickbait is not a good reason to change it. Nor should the default be "use the article's original title" since a better default would be "Highlight what part of this article would be interesting to the Hacker News audience."

sambe 10y ago
The policy avoids encouraging/endorsing clickbait. Aside from that, headlines are not purely functional. Preserving the author's creative choices seems valuable to me in cases such as this. If I haven't got time to skim the start, I probably shouldn't be on HN right now.
ddlatham 10y ago
+1 Much of language derives its meaning from its context. In the context of this blog a title of "The Other Half" can have a very different meaning than a title of "The Other Half" on Hacker News. Lifting the title verbatim to a new context can change its meaning. Even though the intention may be good to be faithful to the original, purely by being in a new context, the title has been effectively changed. In fact, using different words for the title in the HN context can well be more faithful to the meaning than the using the same words.
- skierscott 10y ago
  +1. I didn't know where this article was headed for the first half. Partway through I scrolled and saw "On Thursday I had a heart attack" and with that context I could understand the point of the article.
mseebach 10y ago
It's not 'bizarre', it's unfortunate at best. The piece has a title that isn't very descriptive, and HN policy biases towards transparent link-sharing with no editorialising. No policy is perfect, and it has some casualties, this being one of them. But it has to be weighed against the (IMO) very strong general case benefits of avoiding editorialising.
- c3534l 10y ago
  The policy is a good policy 90% of the time. But there are edge cases where the author writes a terrible headline and then we're also stuck with a terrible headline.
  - pvg 10y ago
    That's not the case. Truly terrible titles - ones that are outright misleading or clickbait get rewritten. "I can't instantly tell what this thing is about from the title" is not really a forum-damaging problem.
  - dang 10y ago
    This one is not a "terrible headline". The author is emphasizing what matters to him about a profound, life-altering experience. We're supposed to overwrite that because internet readers (all of us) are addicted to instant gratification? Nope, that's not how HN works. We want reflective responses, not reflexive ones, those take a bit longer and that's good. If the difference between 1 second and 10 seconds is critical to you (I don't mean you personally, of course, but any reader), HN may not be the website you're looking for. Making a little effort, poking around a little, figuring things out: those are some of the qualities we want to engage here. I could go on about this for hours. Of all the things that make HN different and matter most, this is the one I'm surest of. However, after yesterday I think a better use of resources would be to go back to working on making HN faster. There the difference between 1 and 10 seconds really does matter.
tptacek 10y ago
That doesn't work. The submitter of an HN story doesn't own the story; stories are community property. Submitting doesn't entitle you to choose for the whole site what is or isn't interesting about a story. If you want to do that, you write a comment, like everybody else. This is one of the oldest meta-arguments on the site. Once or twice a month, perhaps, we get a story that isn't particularly well served by the guidelines, and people have to click one more time than they might have, or read a few more sentences than they might have. But pretty much every day, and probably more frequently than that, we see problems stemming from the guideline being broken. Almost everybody reading these comments knows what this story is about now. It's a shame a pointless meta-complaint is bolted to the top of the thread, instead of something actually about the post itself.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "stories are community property." If stories are community property, then the community and not the editors should decide whether the story submission with the title it was submitted with was valuable or not by upvoting it (or not). "Submitting doesn't entitle you to choose for the whole site what is or isn't interesting about a story." I don't see why they couldn't. But using the same argument, the editors shouldn't get to choose for the whole site what the title should be either. I've run across so many, many great stories with super generic, boring titles that will never be even glanced at by most readers. Those stories deserve better, and editing the title to make it reflect what the story is actually about is helpful. HN editors should restrict their roles to keeping the conversations civil, and let the community take care of the rest.
  - dang 10y ago
    > I've run across so many, many great stories with super generic, boring titles that will never be even glanced at by most readers. Those stories deserve better Indeed they do, and there are other strategies for achieving that than gutting HN's approach to titles which is critical to how the site functions. If you have links to stories that fit that description and haven't had attention on HN yet, I'd love to see them.
matthewowen 10y ago
Movie titles according to Hacker News: Man finds wife's head in box. Therapist of boy who sees ghosts is a ghost. Man who killed hero's father is actually his father. I get that you want more information, but sometimes getting the information makes reading something less pleasurable. The author here doesn't disclose the detail you're talking about until a third of the way through. Disclosing it in the title fundamentally changes it, and not in a good way.
- fireflash38 10y ago
  You happen to get lots of information about books and movies from sources other than just the title. Trailers, synopses on the back/inside sleeve, location in the bookstore, genre, all are meant to give people an idea of what they are getting into, rather than pure mystery. Nobody is asking for the hyperbolic titles you gave, they simply would like to know what they are getting into before clicking on some random link.
- ashark 10y ago
  Those are the best kinds of headlines for most informational writing. Look at a newspaper from the early 1900s. You can skim just the headlines in a minute and have a pretty good idea what's gone on. EDIT: see: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/New_York_Times_Frontpage_1914-07-29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/New_York... Basically an unbeatable news consumption interface. Notice even the smaller headlines down the page, which are either independent lower-importance articles or minor articles related to the major ones above. You can read ~15-20 words on each the give you the basics of what happened, very quickly because it's called out in larger type and because the authors were competent and weren't trying to drive clicks, but to deliver value.
  - matthewowen 10y ago
    That's great, but it's totally irrelevant to the style of writing linked here.
    - ashark 10y ago
matt4077 10y ago
I disagree. The idea that headlines serve only informative purposes is rather bizarr. Ever since people wrote words on things, they were an entire literary genre for themselves. Nowadays, people decry anything that isn't a completely literal summary of the article as "clickbait", ignoring decades of history and hundreds of masterpieces. in this case, the actual "event" is not mentioned in the first few paragraphs. This is clearly a literary choice made by the author, and changing the headline would defeat his intentions and be somewhat lacking respect. Here are some historic examples, and The Atlantic's humorous efforts at de-phantasizing them (from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/famous-headlines-rewritten-to-comply-with-facebooks-new-policy/494603/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/famou...): – "Frank Sinatra has a Cold" (Frank Sinatra Is a Complicated Person (and Unfortunately Our Reporter Did Not Get to Speak to Him)) – "Ford to City: Drop Dead" (Ford to New York City: Drop Dead (but He Only Means That Figuratively, As He Intends to Veto Any Bail-Out for New York City’s Municipal Budget)) – "Death of an Innocent" (A Young Man Hiked Into the Alaska Wilderness and Died Under Somewhat Mysterious Circumstances, and Also His Ordeal Raises Larger Questions About American Culture) – "Pearls Before Breakfast" (Most Commuters Didn’t Even Notice When a Violin-Playing Prodigy Masqueraded as a Street Performer) – "Headless Body in Topless Bar"
hnbroseph 10y ago
> since we should all hope for and promote strong writing, and the fact that a strong headline could be confused for clickbait is not a good reason to change it. i don't know what you mean by "strong writing" here.

sambe 10y ago

The policy avoids encouraging/endorsing clickbait. Aside from that, headlines are not purely functional. Preserving the author's creative choices seems valuable to me in cases such as this. If I haven't got time to skim the start, I probably shouldn't be on HN right now.

ddlatham 10y ago

+1 Much of language derives its meaning from its context. In the context of this blog a title of "The Other Half" can have a very different meaning than a title of "The Other Half" on Hacker News. Lifting the title verbatim to a new context can change its meaning. Even though the intention may be good to be faithful to the original, purely by being in a new context, the title has been effectively changed. In fact, using different words for the title in the HN context can well be more faithful to the meaning than the using the same words.

skierscott 10y ago
+1. I didn't know where this article was headed for the first half. Partway through I scrolled and saw "On Thursday I had a heart attack" and with that context I could understand the point of the article.

mseebach 10y ago

It's not 'bizarre', it's unfortunate at best. The piece has a title that isn't very descriptive, and HN policy biases towards transparent link-sharing with no editorialising. No policy is perfect, and it has some casualties, this being one of them. But it has to be weighed against the (IMO) very strong general case benefits of avoiding editorialising.

c3534l 10y ago
The policy is a good policy 90% of the time. But there are edge cases where the author writes a terrible headline and then we're also stuck with a terrible headline.
- pvg 10y ago
  That's not the case. Truly terrible titles - ones that are outright misleading or clickbait get rewritten. "I can't instantly tell what this thing is about from the title" is not really a forum-damaging problem.
- dang 10y ago
  This one is not a "terrible headline". The author is emphasizing what matters to him about a profound, life-altering experience. We're supposed to overwrite that because internet readers (all of us) are addicted to instant gratification? Nope, that's not how HN works. We want reflective responses, not reflexive ones, those take a bit longer and that's good. If the difference between 1 second and 10 seconds is critical to you (I don't mean you personally, of course, but any reader), HN may not be the website you're looking for. Making a little effort, poking around a little, figuring things out: those are some of the qualities we want to engage here. I could go on about this for hours. Of all the things that make HN different and matter most, this is the one I'm surest of. However, after yesterday I think a better use of resources would be to go back to working on making HN faster. There the difference between 1 and 10 seconds really does matter.

tptacek 10y ago

That doesn't work. The submitter of an HN story doesn't own the story; stories are community property. Submitting doesn't entitle you to choose for the whole site what is or isn't interesting about a story. If you want to do that, you write a comment, like everybody else. This is one of the oldest meta-arguments on the site. Once or twice a month, perhaps, we get a story that isn't particularly well served by the guidelines, and people have to click one more time than they might have, or read a few more sentences than they might have. But pretty much every day, and probably more frequently than that, we see problems stemming from the guideline being broken. Almost everybody reading these comments knows what this story is about now. It's a shame a pointless meta-complaint is bolted to the top of the thread, instead of something actually about the post itself.

pmoriarty 10y ago
"stories are community property." If stories are community property, then the community and not the editors should decide whether the story submission with the title it was submitted with was valuable or not by upvoting it (or not). "Submitting doesn't entitle you to choose for the whole site what is or isn't interesting about a story." I don't see why they couldn't. But using the same argument, the editors shouldn't get to choose for the whole site what the title should be either. I've run across so many, many great stories with super generic, boring titles that will never be even glanced at by most readers. Those stories deserve better, and editing the title to make it reflect what the story is actually about is helpful. HN editors should restrict their roles to keeping the conversations civil, and let the community take care of the rest.
- dang 10y ago
  > I've run across so many, many great stories with super generic, boring titles that will never be even glanced at by most readers. Those stories deserve better Indeed they do, and there are other strategies for achieving that than gutting HN's approach to titles which is critical to how the site functions. If you have links to stories that fit that description and haven't had attention on HN yet, I'd love to see them.

matthewowen 10y ago

Movie titles according to Hacker News: Man finds wife's head in box. Therapist of boy who sees ghosts is a ghost. Man who killed hero's father is actually his father. I get that you want more information, but sometimes getting the information makes reading something less pleasurable. The author here doesn't disclose the detail you're talking about until a third of the way through. Disclosing it in the title fundamentally changes it, and not in a good way.

fireflash38 10y ago
You happen to get lots of information about books and movies from sources other than just the title. Trailers, synopses on the back/inside sleeve, location in the bookstore, genre, all are meant to give people an idea of what they are getting into, rather than pure mystery. Nobody is asking for the hyperbolic titles you gave, they simply would like to know what they are getting into before clicking on some random link.
ashark 10y ago
Those are the best kinds of headlines for most informational writing. Look at a newspaper from the early 1900s. You can skim just the headlines in a minute and have a pretty good idea what's gone on. EDIT: see: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/New_York_Times_Frontpage_1914-07-29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/New_York... Basically an unbeatable news consumption interface. Notice even the smaller headlines down the page, which are either independent lower-importance articles or minor articles related to the major ones above. You can read ~15-20 words on each the give you the basics of what happened, very quickly because it's called out in larger type and because the authors were competent and weren't trying to drive clicks, but to deliver value.
- matthewowen 10y ago
  That's great, but it's totally irrelevant to the style of writing linked here.
  - ashark 10y ago

matt4077 10y ago

I disagree. The idea that headlines serve only informative purposes is rather bizarr. Ever since people wrote words on things, they were an entire literary genre for themselves. Nowadays, people decry anything that isn't a completely literal summary of the article as "clickbait", ignoring decades of history and hundreds of masterpieces. in this case, the actual "event" is not mentioned in the first few paragraphs. This is clearly a literary choice made by the author, and changing the headline would defeat his intentions and be somewhat lacking respect. Here are some historic examples, and The Atlantic's humorous efforts at de-phantasizing them (from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/famous-headlines-rewritten-to-comply-with-facebooks-new-policy/494603/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/famou...): – "Frank Sinatra has a Cold" (Frank Sinatra Is a Complicated Person (and Unfortunately Our Reporter Did Not Get to Speak to Him)) – "Ford to City: Drop Dead" (Ford to New York City: Drop Dead (but He Only Means That Figuratively, As He Intends to Veto Any Bail-Out for New York City’s Municipal Budget)) – "Death of an Innocent" (A Young Man Hiked Into the Alaska Wilderness and Died Under Somewhat Mysterious Circumstances, and Also His Ordeal Raises Larger Questions About American Culture) – "Pearls Before Breakfast" (Most Commuters Didn’t Even Notice When a Violin-Playing Prodigy Masqueraded as a Street Performer) – "Headless Body in Topless Bar"

hnbroseph 10y ago

> since we should all hope for and promote strong writing, and the fact that a strong headline could be confused for clickbait is not a good reason to change it. i don't know what you mean by "strong writing" here.