4 ms·

HN has a strict "don't editorialize article titles" policy, backed by a bot that automatically editorializes article titles for you. It's great.

teddyh 4y ago
And sometimes titles are editorialized manually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861&p=2#31397151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861&p=2#31397151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31638648#31643597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31638648#31643597
- dang 4y ago
  Those titles weren't editorialized. They were edited in keeping with HN's title rule, which calls for editing titles when they are either misleading or clickbait. I realize it's annoying when there's an edit that you don't agree with—and I would never claim that we get every case correct. But HN's overall approach to titles is one of the easiest things to defend about the entire site. It makes an enormous difference to the quality of the front page. Edit: you can't compare "HN as it is" to "HN as it is, but without the title edits I dislike". That's not a possible alternative. The alternative is "HN without the current title policy", and that would be a front page inundated with linkbait and sensationalism—exactly what most people come here to avoid.
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    The title policy is fine, but I find it really weird that it's defended as "not editorializing" -- by your own admission, you edit titles to put your own spin on the article's contents, and focus on something different than what the original title wanted to focus on. "Why I no longer recommend Julia" is a perfectly good title, it's prompting a question which the article will hopefully answer. Changing it to focus on correctness and composability bugs, rather than the bigger picture of why the author can't recommend the language, is putting your own spin, aka, editorializing. And that's fine! But you really should admit it, rather than crouching behind a weird defense.
    - dang 4y ago
      I'm happy to admit mistakes (and correct them!) but this is inaccurate. We don't edit titles to put our own personal spin on a topic, which is what the word editorializing means. We look closely at the article itself to find what it is actually saying. If we do replace a title, we replace it with representative language from the article itself wherever possible. This has been the case for a long time: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=representative%20article%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... That does involve some interpretive judgment—because why pick one phrase rather than another—but less than you might think, because nearly every article has a point where the author says what they're actually writing about. We never do this to convey an opinion of our own. We don't much care what people think or what an article says. We care whether the title accurately represents what the article is saying, and does so in a way that isn't baity, because that is the biggest influence on discussion quality. The submission you guys are bringing up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861) illustrates the point. "Why I no longer recommend Julia" is a baity title, because it doesn't say anything specific about why. It's just a pointer that says "I boo Julia". "Boo $language" is for sure flamebait on this site. Such titles generate threads that are just generic boo-vs.-yay ventings between people who like $thing and people who don't. The substantive points of the article are lost under such a title. This is not true on the original blog, because there the title is just the first sentence, and any comments show up only at the end. But it's definitely true on an internet forum where the title is the entire representation of the article for most readers and commenters. For that reason, we chose to change the title, and for that we looked at the article (https://yuri.is/not-julia/ https://yuri.is/not-julia/) to find where it says what it is actually about—the "representative language" I mentioned above. This was not hard to find—it's in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th paragraphs of the OP. Particularly the 4th, which reads: My conclusion after using Julia for many years is that there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters. That's the article's own summary of what it says, so we made it the title. Basically we followed the pointer and replaced it with what it points to.
      - teddyh 4y ago
frosted-flakes 4y ago
The bot removes common clickbait words ("How to...", "12 reasons to...", etc.), and you can change it back if it's not warranted.
dang 4y ago
Don't confuse "edit" with "editorialize". Editorializing is editing a title to put one's own spin on it. HN's actual rule isn't hard to find—it's in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which is linked at the bottom of every page and which commenters here ought to be familiar with. This is what it says: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Note that "unless".

teddyh 4y ago

And sometimes titles are editorialized manually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861&p=2#31397151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861&p=2#31397151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31638648#31643597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31638648#31643597

dang 4y ago
Those titles weren't editorialized. They were edited in keeping with HN's title rule, which calls for editing titles when they are either misleading or clickbait. I realize it's annoying when there's an edit that you don't agree with—and I would never claim that we get every case correct. But HN's overall approach to titles is one of the easiest things to defend about the entire site. It makes an enormous difference to the quality of the front page. Edit: you can't compare "HN as it is" to "HN as it is, but without the title edits I dislike". That's not a possible alternative. The alternative is "HN without the current title policy", and that would be a front page inundated with linkbait and sensationalism—exactly what most people come here to avoid.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  The title policy is fine, but I find it really weird that it's defended as "not editorializing" -- by your own admission, you edit titles to put your own spin on the article's contents, and focus on something different than what the original title wanted to focus on. "Why I no longer recommend Julia" is a perfectly good title, it's prompting a question which the article will hopefully answer. Changing it to focus on correctness and composability bugs, rather than the bigger picture of why the author can't recommend the language, is putting your own spin, aka, editorializing. And that's fine! But you really should admit it, rather than crouching behind a weird defense.
  - dang 4y ago
    I'm happy to admit mistakes (and correct them!) but this is inaccurate. We don't edit titles to put our own personal spin on a topic, which is what the word editorializing means. We look closely at the article itself to find what it is actually saying. If we do replace a title, we replace it with representative language from the article itself wherever possible. This has been the case for a long time: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=representative%20article%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... That does involve some interpretive judgment—because why pick one phrase rather than another—but less than you might think, because nearly every article has a point where the author says what they're actually writing about. We never do this to convey an opinion of our own. We don't much care what people think or what an article says. We care whether the title accurately represents what the article is saying, and does so in a way that isn't baity, because that is the biggest influence on discussion quality. The submission you guys are bringing up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861) illustrates the point. "Why I no longer recommend Julia" is a baity title, because it doesn't say anything specific about why. It's just a pointer that says "I boo Julia". "Boo $language" is for sure flamebait on this site. Such titles generate threads that are just generic boo-vs.-yay ventings between people who like $thing and people who don't. The substantive points of the article are lost under such a title. This is not true on the original blog, because there the title is just the first sentence, and any comments show up only at the end. But it's definitely true on an internet forum where the title is the entire representation of the article for most readers and commenters. For that reason, we chose to change the title, and for that we looked at the article (https://yuri.is/not-julia/ https://yuri.is/not-julia/) to find where it says what it is actually about—the "representative language" I mentioned above. This was not hard to find—it's in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th paragraphs of the OP. Particularly the 4th, which reads: My conclusion after using Julia for many years is that there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters. That's the article's own summary of what it says, so we made it the title. Basically we followed the pointer and replaced it with what it points to.
    - teddyh 4y ago

frosted-flakes 4y ago

The bot removes common clickbait words ("How to...", "12 reasons to...", etc.), and you can change it back if it's not warranted.

dang 4y ago

Don't confuse "edit" with "editorialize". Editorializing is editing a title to put one's own spin on it. HN's actual rule isn't hard to find—it's in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which is linked at the bottom of every page and which commenters here ought to be familiar with. This is what it says: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Note that "unless".