4 ms·

Can we also get the submission title changed to something less useful, please?

by dane-pgp 5y ago

dang 5y ago
Not following you here.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  The article's title is "Tibia (video game)", which is much less useful as a submission title than "Tibia (1997) is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs", yet the HN rules require that the former be used instead of the latter. I get that there are reasons for this rule, but if the rule is going to be enforced at all, it should be enforced consistently.
  - dang 5y ago
    I could answer this a few different ways, but the bottom line is that HN is a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place, so you can't expect a mechanical consistency in moderation. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20spirit%20letter%20law&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... There's a sizeable subset of HN users who want rules to be enforced that way and I appreciate that completely, but the domain is just too complex to allow for it. If we tried, we'd end up being more inconsistent in worse ways. Another way of answering the question is that the guidelines list the major rules and there are also many minor rules or heuristics (hundreds of them, I suppose) that have emerged over 15 years of practice, and it doesn't make sense to try to formalize them all. Ultimately, there's no way to eliminate the element of human judgment and interpretation from the role of moderating a place like HN, and it would be unwise to try. That doesn't mean that we don't try our best to be evenhanded and consistent—we definitely do. But in the end you're all victims of our gut feelings a.k.a. pattern matching, to put it dramatically. The check and balance on all this is that if we get something significantly wrong, the community is never shy about quickly letting us know, and in such cases we hasten to admit and fix the mistake.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      Thank you for the detailed answer. I guess I'll update my own heuristic, so that in future I'll add extra context to submission titles when linking to pages like Wikipedia articles which don't generally include enough context in their default titles.

Can we also get the submission title changed to something less useful, please?

dang 5y ago

Not following you here.

dane-pgp 5y ago
The article's title is "Tibia (video game)", which is much less useful as a submission title than "Tibia (1997) is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs", yet the HN rules require that the former be used instead of the latter. I get that there are reasons for this rule, but if the rule is going to be enforced at all, it should be enforced consistently.
- dang 5y ago
  I could answer this a few different ways, but the bottom line is that HN is a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place, so you can't expect a mechanical consistency in moderation. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20spirit%20letter%20law&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... There's a sizeable subset of HN users who want rules to be enforced that way and I appreciate that completely, but the domain is just too complex to allow for it. If we tried, we'd end up being more inconsistent in worse ways. Another way of answering the question is that the guidelines list the major rules and there are also many minor rules or heuristics (hundreds of them, I suppose) that have emerged over 15 years of practice, and it doesn't make sense to try to formalize them all. Ultimately, there's no way to eliminate the element of human judgment and interpretation from the role of moderating a place like HN, and it would be unwise to try. That doesn't mean that we don't try our best to be evenhanded and consistent—we definitely do. But in the end you're all victims of our gut feelings a.k.a. pattern matching, to put it dramatically. The check and balance on all this is that if we get something significantly wrong, the community is never shy about quickly letting us know, and in such cases we hasten to admit and fix the mistake.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    Thank you for the detailed answer. I guess I'll update my own heuristic, so that in future I'll add extra context to submission titles when linking to pages like Wikipedia articles which don't generally include enough context in their default titles.