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Some of these edits seem really questionable when laid out like this. Pew Research: 2.2% of Americans produce 97% of political tweets ↓ Small share of U.S. a

Some of these edits seem really questionable when laid out like this. Pew Research: 2.2% of Americans produce 97% of political tweets ↓ Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics Why remove the exact figures? Former Apple chip executives found company to take on Intel, AMD ↓ Three of Apple and Google’s former star chip designers launch NUVIA Isn't "star designers" more subjective than "executives"? 1.2B people exposed in data leak includes personal info, LinkedIn, Facebook ↓ Personal and social information of 1B people discovered in data leak Why make the headline less informative? Data leaks happen regularly. Data leaks from Facebook and LinkedIn has different implications than a leak from LexisNexis or a random blog. Cloudflare open-sources Flan Scan, a network vulnerability scanner ↓ Flan Scan: Lightweight Network Vulnerability Scanner Again, why remove info? The fact that CloudFlare is behind this is more interesting than yet another random tool. Mozilla: “Dear Facebook: Stop cross site tracking by default” ↓ Dear Facebook: Stop cross site tracking by default Same complaint. This distinguishes a random person making a random gripe from freakin' Mozilla who has the control to make Facebook's tracking more difficult. ---- Every single one of these headlines actually are less informative or less interesting (in general, of lower quality) than their original submissions. They actually served to make HN less informative. WTF? That gripe aside, most of the edits are useful (typo fixing, adding dates, and such). These just leave me scratching my head.

zamadatix 7y ago
Most of these edits seem to be to make the title match the title of the article instead of being editoralized. From the guidelines: "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important. Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title. If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids." Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
- Karunamon 7y ago
  Any definition of "editorializing" I've ever heard involved injection of opinion - none of the above did that (and in a couple of cases, the title reversions went from a statement of objective fact to a subjective statement of opinion, in direct contravention of the guideline). Isn't that exactly the opposite of how it's supposed to be done? "Editorializing" is a meaningless term if it means adding neutral, factual clarifying statements (example: "small share" -> 2.5%) Further examples: PIA (PrivateInternetAccess) VPN bought by company known for distributing malware ↓ PIA: Our Merger with Kape Technologies – Addressing Your Concerns Useful -> Non-useful. Who is PIA and why should I care that they're merging? Expanding the acronym was useful in this case. Not doing so is a form of clickbait all on its own. The difference between an expert’s brain and a novice’s ↓ Differences between expert and novice brains in mice: study Note that the original headline is the one used by the source. Okay, so clarifying statements and general rewording can be added to non-clickbait, non-editorialized headlines in some cases, but not others? Seriously, I'd like to not have to make work for the mods, but I see this lack of consistency combined with unintuitive, seemingly against-rules changes here that I actually do not know what is expected of me when submitting an article given that a plain reading of the guidelines doesn't match the application in the real world. When you have a rule that's actively making things worse, and is this confusing even for the people who enforce it (I'm seeing a lot of headlines that have multiple changes, hours apart) it's not a bad idea to consider revising the rule.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > Any definition of "editorializing" I've ever heard involved injection of opinion - none of the above did that Taking that PIA headline as an example, even if the chosen title is factual ("bought a company known for distributing malware"), the submitter is still making a judgement about what part of the story is most important. That is editorializing.
  - dang 7y ago
    Cherry-picking details is the quintessential form of editorializing. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20cherry%20editorializ&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for more. Let's look at your further examples. 1. Re "PIA (PrivateInternetAccess) VPN bought by company known for distributing malware", that one was outrageously editorialized. This is a complicated case though, because we often allow changed titles when the article is a corporate press release. Companies tend to use bland nothing-to-see-here language that can be misleading in its own right. But "bought by company known for distributing malware" is a massive claim and we have no idea whether it's true. We're in no position to adjudicate the truth or falsehood of everything people put in titles. So in this case, both choices were bad: the editorialized title as well as the bland original. If we could have come up with a better (i.e. accurate and neutral) title, we would have used it. But it wasn't obvious how to do that, so we went with the lesser evil of the original title. (We also got an email complaining about the editorialized title, but the complaint didn't cause us to change it, it just caused us to take a closer look.) As for the acronym, it would exceed the 80 char limit to expand it in the title, so I didn't. Also, "Private Internet Access" is so generic a phrase that I'm not sure it's all that clarifying. Anyone who would know what that phrase means in this context would already know what PIA stands for. For those who don't, it would only take a tiny bit work to find out, and it's not a bad thing for readers to have to work a little. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22work%20a%20little%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... One more thing, too: when an acronym is used in a title unexpanded (e.g. "CS", "AWS", "AMA"), it often contains the subtle additional information that the acronym is a widely-used one in the community, which PIA is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=pia&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... So in this case I'd say the acronym was a wash. By the way, we really do consider all these details when weighing how to edit a title, and since I was the moderator in this case I can tell I did that; more, even—but this answer is already too long. 2. We've learned from long experience that science articles lead to shallow, angry arguments when their titles make excessive claims. Instead of talking about the actual finding, the threads fill up with objections to how overstated the title is, and (worse) generic ventings about title inaccuracy and the decline of journalism and western civilization. In other words, such titles are baity. We've learned that the best way to de-bait them is simply to narrow their scope, i.e. shrink the title down to the size of the real story. In this case we applied two scope-narrowers: "in mice", which is a great de-baiter when the story is about a mouse study, and ": study", which makes it clear that the topic is just a study, not the god's-lips-to-your-ears revelation that headline writers love to imply. Basically, it's their job to sex up the title and our job to knock it down to size. Those two devices work well for preventing science-article threads from going off track in predictable ways. --- I know all of this can appear inconsistent, but that's because there's so much more going on, so many more concerns and details than one would ever imagine in the title-editing domain. For the first few years I did this job I used to find that irritating—how can an issue as trivial as internet titles be so important? Over time I learned how much more there is to it. I wrote about this here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573. The one thing I feel most comfortable defending about all this is how consistent we are—not completely consistent, but for sure relatively. You may not agree with the principles and that's fine, but we're not applying them arbitrarily. A nice aspect of the job is that we don't have to apply them arbitrarily: we have a good set of principles to rely on and they cover most of what comes up. We could talk for the rest of the year about specific cases and why exactly we edited them the way we did. But it all comes down to the site guidelines and the fact that intellectual curiosity is the organizing value of this site.
dang 7y ago
> Why remove the exact figures? That submitter broke the site guidelines by changing the article title when it was neither misleading nor clickbait—so we changed it back. Also, we've found that when a title is gratuitously numerical, it makes for worse discussion. Why? I don't know. It just does. Therefore, if anything, we take numbers out rather than add them in. For the same reason, we wrote software to abbreviate "1,000,000" to "1M", "1,000,000,000" to "1B" and so on. Numbers in titles are baity and long numbers baitier. > Isn't "star designers" more subjective than "executives"? That title changed because we switched to a different URL and updated the title to match the new article. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616157. > Why make the headline less informative? [...] Data leaks from Facebook and LinkedIn has different implications than a leak from LexisNexis or a random blog. That submitter broke the site guideline against editorializing. It's editorializing to cherry-pick the details that you consider important and put them in the title. That amounts to the power to determine the story for everyone else, and on HN, submitters don't get such power. We prioritize authors; submitters have no special rights over a story. If a submitter wants to say what they think is important about an article, they're welcome to do that in the comment thread, on a level playing field with everyone else. In fact there was a lot of data leaked in that leak, not just LinkedIn's and Facebook's. That's another important. Putting famous names in a title makes it baitier and evokes lower-quality discussion, because it activates everyone's pre-cached responses about the famous names. If anything, we are inclined to take famous names out of a title, and certainly not to add them in. > Again, why remove info? The fact that CloudFlare is behind this is more interesting Because cloudflare.com is right next to the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21605719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21605719. From the guidelines: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. > Same complaint. This distinguishes a random person making a random gripe from freakin' Mozilla Same answer: mozilla.org is right next to the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599496. Avoiding repetition is part of HN being organized around curiosity.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > cloudflare.com is right next to the title > mozilla.org is right next to the title Hmm... hey, petercooper, perhaps you should consider including the submission website in the edit tracker somehow? Without that, anyone who reads the edit tracker is missing an important piece of information that actual HN readers see.
blondin 7y ago
it's nitpicking... i just saw "A History of APL in 50 Functions" (the original title) changed to "A History of APL in Fifty Functions". HN's hive-mind at work. social platforms need to rotate mods imo.

zamadatix 7y ago

Most of these edits seem to be to make the title match the title of the article instead of being editoralized. From the guidelines: "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important. Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title. If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids." Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

Karunamon 7y ago
Any definition of "editorializing" I've ever heard involved injection of opinion - none of the above did that (and in a couple of cases, the title reversions went from a statement of objective fact to a subjective statement of opinion, in direct contravention of the guideline). Isn't that exactly the opposite of how it's supposed to be done? "Editorializing" is a meaningless term if it means adding neutral, factual clarifying statements (example: "small share" -> 2.5%) Further examples: PIA (PrivateInternetAccess) VPN bought by company known for distributing malware ↓ PIA: Our Merger with Kape Technologies – Addressing Your Concerns Useful -> Non-useful. Who is PIA and why should I care that they're merging? Expanding the acronym was useful in this case. Not doing so is a form of clickbait all on its own. The difference between an expert’s brain and a novice’s ↓ Differences between expert and novice brains in mice: study Note that the original headline is the one used by the source. Okay, so clarifying statements and general rewording can be added to non-clickbait, non-editorialized headlines in some cases, but not others? Seriously, I'd like to not have to make work for the mods, but I see this lack of consistency combined with unintuitive, seemingly against-rules changes here that I actually do not know what is expected of me when submitting an article given that a plain reading of the guidelines doesn't match the application in the real world. When you have a rule that's actively making things worse, and is this confusing even for the people who enforce it (I'm seeing a lot of headlines that have multiple changes, hours apart) it's not a bad idea to consider revising the rule.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > Any definition of "editorializing" I've ever heard involved injection of opinion - none of the above did that Taking that PIA headline as an example, even if the chosen title is factual ("bought a company known for distributing malware"), the submitter is still making a judgement about what part of the story is most important. That is editorializing.
- dang 7y ago
  Cherry-picking details is the quintessential form of editorializing. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20cherry%20editorializ&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for more. Let's look at your further examples. 1. Re "PIA (PrivateInternetAccess) VPN bought by company known for distributing malware", that one was outrageously editorialized. This is a complicated case though, because we often allow changed titles when the article is a corporate press release. Companies tend to use bland nothing-to-see-here language that can be misleading in its own right. But "bought by company known for distributing malware" is a massive claim and we have no idea whether it's true. We're in no position to adjudicate the truth or falsehood of everything people put in titles. So in this case, both choices were bad: the editorialized title as well as the bland original. If we could have come up with a better (i.e. accurate and neutral) title, we would have used it. But it wasn't obvious how to do that, so we went with the lesser evil of the original title. (We also got an email complaining about the editorialized title, but the complaint didn't cause us to change it, it just caused us to take a closer look.) As for the acronym, it would exceed the 80 char limit to expand it in the title, so I didn't. Also, "Private Internet Access" is so generic a phrase that I'm not sure it's all that clarifying. Anyone who would know what that phrase means in this context would already know what PIA stands for. For those who don't, it would only take a tiny bit work to find out, and it's not a bad thing for readers to have to work a little. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22work%20a%20little%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... One more thing, too: when an acronym is used in a title unexpanded (e.g. "CS", "AWS", "AMA"), it often contains the subtle additional information that the acronym is a widely-used one in the community, which PIA is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=pia&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... So in this case I'd say the acronym was a wash. By the way, we really do consider all these details when weighing how to edit a title, and since I was the moderator in this case I can tell I did that; more, even—but this answer is already too long. 2. We've learned from long experience that science articles lead to shallow, angry arguments when their titles make excessive claims. Instead of talking about the actual finding, the threads fill up with objections to how overstated the title is, and (worse) generic ventings about title inaccuracy and the decline of journalism and western civilization. In other words, such titles are baity. We've learned that the best way to de-bait them is simply to narrow their scope, i.e. shrink the title down to the size of the real story. In this case we applied two scope-narrowers: "in mice", which is a great de-baiter when the story is about a mouse study, and ": study", which makes it clear that the topic is just a study, not the god's-lips-to-your-ears revelation that headline writers love to imply. Basically, it's their job to sex up the title and our job to knock it down to size. Those two devices work well for preventing science-article threads from going off track in predictable ways. --- I know all of this can appear inconsistent, but that's because there's so much more going on, so many more concerns and details than one would ever imagine in the title-editing domain. For the first few years I did this job I used to find that irritating—how can an issue as trivial as internet titles be so important? Over time I learned how much more there is to it. I wrote about this here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573. The one thing I feel most comfortable defending about all this is how consistent we are—not completely consistent, but for sure relatively. You may not agree with the principles and that's fine, but we're not applying them arbitrarily. A nice aspect of the job is that we don't have to apply them arbitrarily: we have a good set of principles to rely on and they cover most of what comes up. We could talk for the rest of the year about specific cases and why exactly we edited them the way we did. But it all comes down to the site guidelines and the fact that intellectual curiosity is the organizing value of this site.

dang 7y ago

> Why remove the exact figures? That submitter broke the site guidelines by changing the article title when it was neither misleading nor clickbait—so we changed it back. Also, we've found that when a title is gratuitously numerical, it makes for worse discussion. Why? I don't know. It just does. Therefore, if anything, we take numbers out rather than add them in. For the same reason, we wrote software to abbreviate "1,000,000" to "1M", "1,000,000,000" to "1B" and so on. Numbers in titles are baity and long numbers baitier. > Isn't "star designers" more subjective than "executives"? That title changed because we switched to a different URL and updated the title to match the new article. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616157. > Why make the headline less informative? [...] Data leaks from Facebook and LinkedIn has different implications than a leak from LexisNexis or a random blog. That submitter broke the site guideline against editorializing. It's editorializing to cherry-pick the details that you consider important and put them in the title. That amounts to the power to determine the story for everyone else, and on HN, submitters don't get such power. We prioritize authors; submitters have no special rights over a story. If a submitter wants to say what they think is important about an article, they're welcome to do that in the comment thread, on a level playing field with everyone else. In fact there was a lot of data leaked in that leak, not just LinkedIn's and Facebook's. That's another important. Putting famous names in a title makes it baitier and evokes lower-quality discussion, because it activates everyone's pre-cached responses about the famous names. If anything, we are inclined to take famous names out of a title, and certainly not to add them in. > Again, why remove info? The fact that CloudFlare is behind this is more interesting Because cloudflare.com is right next to the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21605719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21605719. From the guidelines: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. > Same complaint. This distinguishes a random person making a random gripe from freakin' Mozilla Same answer: mozilla.org is right next to the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599496. Avoiding repetition is part of HN being organized around curiosity.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> cloudflare.com is right next to the title > mozilla.org is right next to the title Hmm... hey, petercooper, perhaps you should consider including the submission website in the edit tracker somehow? Without that, anyone who reads the edit tracker is missing an important piece of information that actual HN readers see.

blondin 7y ago

it's nitpicking... i just saw "A History of APL in 50 Functions" (the original title) changed to "A History of APL in Fifty Functions". HN's hive-mind at work. social platforms need to rotate mods imo.