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This title serves to illustrate that HN’s unnecessary (to me) policy of culling leading conjunctions such as how and why can lead to misleading titles such as t
by indigodaddy 4y ago
This title serves to illustrate that HN’s unnecessary (to me) policy of culling leading conjunctions such as how and why can lead to misleading titles such as this one.
My first instinct was, even before skimming the actual article, to comment a snarky “well, yes that’s kind of the point.” But then I decided to click on the link and see that the actual title of the article is “__HOW__ Rate Hikes Are Affecting the Economy,” which actually makes sense and denotes something completely different than it does when the “how” is omitted.
Can anyone explain why HN’s submission script does this? Because IMO it is more of a nuisance than having any perceived benefits. I understand that it is perhaps just a mechanism to shorten titles, but I think the feature should be removed (no pun intended!)
- eastAligned 4y agoProbaby just a simple way to renove standard clickbait formats; I think in this case "The effect of rate hikes on the economy" would be the desired title.
- silisili 4y agoMaybe it's just me, but 'How rate hikes' feels like it would be a more approachable article. 'The effect of rate hikes' sounds more scientific, like a link to some economics paper I'd likely not make much sense of.
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoI agree with you. When I post, I quite often correct the title that HN culls, because otherwise the sense of the title becomes quite different.
- dang 4y agoWe do it because leading hows are most often linkbait. It works well on balance. However, literally all the attention goes to the failure cases. When successes aren't counted and failures are, it's unsurprising that a system seems not to work well. This is a problem with title edits in general. Maybe it would help if we built software for users to suggest title edits.