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The guidelines on titles allow for writing your own title as long as accurate and more informative than the original title. The bigger problem, I think, is the
by ballenf 9y ago
The guidelines on titles allow for writing your own title as long as accurate and more informative than the original title.
The bigger problem, I think, is the velocity of articles appearing and disappearing from the front page makes follow-up articles have an inherently smaller starting audience.
- DanBC 9y ago> The guidelines on titles allow for writing your own title as long as accurate and more informative than the original title. Mods appear really clear about this. They want you to use the original title unless it's clickbait, or inflammatory, or misleading. Only then can you change it, and they say an informative sentence from the article might do. This means that articles with terrible, unclear, titles get posted to HN all the time. See eg this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15540388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15540388 (Of course, I'm not a mod, so maybe I'm wrong.)
- lmm 9y agoCertainly mods actively edit useful titles, explanatory titles to replace them with the terrible, unclear original title (Steven Hawking's PhD thesis is a good recent example).