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Why did the title get changed from the original NYT title? "The Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis."
by Naac 6y ago
Why did the title get changed from the original NYT title?
"The Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis."
- dang 6y agoWe changed it because it was baity. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. When we do that, we try to replace the title with representative language from the article itself (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22representative%20language%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). There's nearly always something—if not a subheading, then a sentence in the article body—that neutrally summarizes the article. (The latter was the case here.) Doing this rather than making up titles ourselves lets the content speak for itself, and in the case of big media articles is probably closer to the author's intent, since authors don't write headlines.
- Naac 6y agoThanks for the explanation, and for the all the effort you guys put in moderating the site.