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Personal opinion, but I think it's time that HN increases the character limit, we are seeing more and more of these sort of things.
by drannex 5y ago
Personal opinion, but I think it's time that HN increases the character limit, we are seeing more and more of these sort of things.
- kazinator 5y agoIt's a tricky business. In terms of raw screen width, we have it. Or do we? Not necessarily on mobile, in portrait orientation. From a readability/usability perspective, imagine the HN front page being filled top to bottom with titles, some of which go to 150 characters; what would that be like? (A mock-up could be easily obtained for evaluation; or HN could just experiment with it for a few days.) Currently, most titles don't strain the existing limit. When we scan the front page now, for instance, there are good many short and medium length titles. A modest increase, say by +20 characters, might relieve most of the pressure without too many negative effects. Which is to say that maybe the current limit is a bit to the left of the true "sweet spot".
- tux3 5y agoI think I'd be happy with longer titles, since that's an artificial limitation separate from how we vote and judge submissions. If posts have unnecessarily long titles enough to bother, they'll be systematically downvoted a little more and fall out of practice. If the system wanted to put a hard limit on wordiness, it should have a good reason why! We're all wasting a little time on inefficiencies otherwise.