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>I would also argue that hiding "the aim behind the submission" is soft of the point, submissions should be able to stand on their own. If more context is requi

>I would also argue that hiding "the aim behind the submission" is soft of the point, submissions should be able to stand on their own. If more context is required then a better link should be found IMO, a HN submission title is not the place for an opinion piece. Worst case scenario add a comment in your submission explaining your rationale. I feel like that then runs afoul of HN's other guideline to prefer primary sources. Consider the following scenario: PopularSoftware v.6.2 sneaks in a one-line mention in its changelog that the software will now proactively scan the contents of your computer. This would obviously be newsworthy and would make for a popular point of discussion for HN. How best should that be communicated in the submission? If we follow HN guidelines, the submission title should be copied from the main page, "PopularSoftware v.6.2 is released!" That doesn't really make it clear to the HN user casually scanning the front page that the submission is really trying to draw your attention to that particular, controversial bullet point. An alternative would be promoting someone's blogpost or analysis of PopularSoftware 6.2 and its disclosure of hard-disk scanning. But as I mentioned earlier, you'd be promoting a secondary source over a primary source simply for the sake of clarity in the submission title.

simias 8y ago
That's a fair point but in my experience in these situations the controversial bullet point would be pointed out by the top upvoted submission when you open the comments so it's only one click away anyway. I hope that people on HN don't upvote/downvote stories based solely on their titles, and if I see an upvoted story whose title is "PopularSoftware v.6.2 is released!" I'm definitely going to check what the people have to say in the comments. I mean you've been here for quite a while judging by your profile, do you really find this to be a practical problem while browsing HN? Personally it's really a non-issue and the potential slippery slope of letting people come up with custom submission titles is not really worth it IMO.
- cesarb 8y ago
  > I hope that people on HN don't upvote/downvote stories based solely on their titles, and if I see an upvoted story whose title is "PopularSoftware v.6.2 is released!" I'm definitely going to check what the people have to say in the comments. Even if they don't, if the title is too boring they might let the story pass without doing either. A story titled simply "PopularSoftware v6.2.1 released" (it's even a x.y.1 release, which commonly means only small bug fixes) might not attract enough attention to get more than a few upvotes.

simias 8y ago

That's a fair point but in my experience in these situations the controversial bullet point would be pointed out by the top upvoted submission when you open the comments so it's only one click away anyway. I hope that people on HN don't upvote/downvote stories based solely on their titles, and if I see an upvoted story whose title is "PopularSoftware v.6.2 is released!" I'm definitely going to check what the people have to say in the comments. I mean you've been here for quite a while judging by your profile, do you really find this to be a practical problem while browsing HN? Personally it's really a non-issue and the potential slippery slope of letting people come up with custom submission titles is not really worth it IMO.

cesarb 8y ago
> I hope that people on HN don't upvote/downvote stories based solely on their titles, and if I see an upvoted story whose title is "PopularSoftware v.6.2 is released!" I'm definitely going to check what the people have to say in the comments. Even if they don't, if the title is too boring they might let the story pass without doing either. A story titled simply "PopularSoftware v6.2.1 released" (it's even a x.y.1 release, which commonly means only small bug fixes) might not attract enough attention to get more than a few upvotes.