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Ask HN: Can HN allow longer title submissions?
I've been an HN user for more than 10 years, and remember when the "title" field for submnissions could hold 100 characters. Then it dropped to 90, and for many years the max length has been 80 characters.
The problem I am encountering more and more often is news article titles are getting longer. I believe this is because digital news headlines are no longer tied to legacy print publications (which often require short headlines to fit within a limited physical space on the page) and a desire among news orgs to leverage title keywords to rank higher in search.
While I can edit these headlines down to fit 80 characters, they often lose critical meaning or details. For instance, I just submitted an LA Times article whose original title was:
Newsom’s shorter California bullet train plan likely to run out of money before completion
The original title is 90 chars. Removing the governor's name reduces the length to 81 characters. At that point there's no easy fixes aside from removing "shorter" from the title, at which point it's not really clear what plan is being referred to.
I typically submit between 1 and 10 items to HN every week (https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ilamont), and have to perform similar edits on many of them. I know I am not alone.
Is there any good reason to continue restricting the headline length for HN submissions? If not, can it be reset to a length more in line with modern digital news styles?
- p1esk 8y agoCalifornia bullet train plan to run out of money is more than sufficient to convey what the article is about. It provides more than enough info to decide whether to click on it. Shorter is always better when you want to attract someone’s attention.
- smt88 8y ago"Newsom’s shorter bullet train plan likely to run out of money before completion" (79 chars) "CA governor's bullet train plan likely to run out of money before completion" (76 chars) "California governor's bullet train plan likely under-funded" (59) > modern digital news styles A lot of modern headlines, even in highly-reputable publications, have been affected by the BuzzFeed full-sentence-clickbait style, which makes it a lot harder to skim for topics you want. This works well on publications' websites because they have columns, categories, tags, and by-lines that help identify the topic better. HN has none of these, and the host domain next to the title is becoming less and less useful (mostly due to Medium).