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Ask HN: Thoughts on expanding the 80 character limit for Title posts
- 1cvmask 5y agoIt seems that there are more articles with longer titles nowadays and having to truncate them sometimes leads to the title being mangled and "lost in translation." Should we expand it to say 100 characters? Every limit is arbitrary by nature of course. But it seems reasonable to me to expand it to at least 100 characters. Maybe there are UI/UX issues for the 80 character limitation that I am not aware of. Can't ever imagine it is a technical limitation. In addition, I always feel reluctant to edit the titles down to 80 characters and often feel if I am "censorious". I don't want to be in the position of interpreting the true intent of the title when constricting it.
- Kye 5y agoI assume it started as a kindness to 80 character wide terminals a lot of people use to browse HN since it was an easy way to pick a limit, the same way Twitter's original limit was the length of an SMS and stayed that way long after apps became the main way to interact. Let's make it 140.
- karmakaze 5y agoNo. It's a title not a synopsis/TL;DR. If you can't get the meaning across in 80 chars, then what's the actual/main point of the post? Also it would be terrible for mobile.
- Kye 5y agoIn my experience, submitter-written titles in better-run subreddits make figuring out what I want to read much easier and they almost always blow past 80 characters. I don't know if it's the same with longer titles on blogs/news sites, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a connection between title length and article quality.
- hidden-spyder 5y agoI'm in support. I've often had to editorialize good titles due to the limit.