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The original title was closer to what you are alluding to here. Idk why but hacker news changed it to say "We"
by yachtman 7y ago
The original title was closer to what you are alluding to here. Idk why but hacker news changed it to say "We"
- Mathnerd314 7y agoIt's part of the line before the picture of "the The Parsimonious Yachtman".
- dang 7y agoOn HN, moderators edit titles that are misleading or linkbait, as the site guidelines ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). It's a linkbait trope to use "you" in a title, because it grabs attention whether the topic has anything to do with the reader or not. That's why "you" is headline writers' favorite pronoun. Combining it with a pejorative ("you have no idea") makes it even more sensational. That's definitely the sort of title we edit. When we edit a title, we look for a representative phrase in the article itself that expresses its point in a more neutral way. That's what a moderator did in this case. The language comes from the article's own summary of itself: "After all of these years, I finally came to one simple conclusion. With all due respect: we are completely clueless about how long things should take." Reading the article text to find how it states its own conclusion, removing any residual linkbait (such as the superlative "completely"), and making that the title instead is the best way we've found to correct titles that break the site guidelines.