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The headline is "5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ornette Coleman".

by pohl 4y ago

SevenNation 4y ago
Why does HN monkey with titles like this?
- dang 4y ago
  The alternative is for HN to be dominated by clickbait, which would make for a completely different site. The title editing system (software and mods) works well except when it doesn't. The cases where it works well are priced in—they aren't noticeable and everyone takes them for granted. The cases where it doesn't work do get noticed, and often amplified. It's understandable! but skewed. If you weight the pros of a system at 0% and the cons at 100%, it ends up looking inexplicably terrible. Incidentally, the fix for the OP is not to add the magic number back—it's to rewrite the title so it's not clickbait to begin with. That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (I've done that now.)
mortenjorck 4y ago
HN's headline style auto-formatter is getting weirder. Are all leading numbers removed now? Would "3,700 expected to be laid off from Twitter" become "expected to be laid off from Twitter"? I appreciate the intent of this algorithm, but I'm not convinced it's still fulfilling its original purpose.
- tpmoney 4y ago
  I wonder if it’s just programmed to look for clickbait listicle numbers like 5 secrets your doctor doesn’t want you to know 10 ways to grow muscle without exercising And that sort of thing. Maybe it’s even just looking for any leading number under 15 or something like that. I’d expect out of any random assortment of modern day headlines, most that start with a low number are clickbait nonsense, where something that starts with a number in the hundreds or thousands is likely to be a real article
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  This isn't "getting weirder", this has been the case for close to a decade if not more. HN has long removed the numbers. The good news is that the submitter has time (though in this case I think it's expired) to edit headlines for submissions, I think it's the same time window as comment editing, 1.5-2 hours. When you submit a headline and it's altered by HN in a meaningful way, you can change it back to the original.

The headline is "5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ornette Coleman".

by pohl 4y ago

The headline is "5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ornette Coleman".

SevenNation 4y ago

Why does HN monkey with titles like this?

dang 4y ago
The alternative is for HN to be dominated by clickbait, which would make for a completely different site. The title editing system (software and mods) works well except when it doesn't. The cases where it works well are priced in—they aren't noticeable and everyone takes them for granted. The cases where it doesn't work do get noticed, and often amplified. It's understandable! but skewed. If you weight the pros of a system at 0% and the cons at 100%, it ends up looking inexplicably terrible. Incidentally, the fix for the OP is not to add the magic number back—it's to rewrite the title so it's not clickbait to begin with. That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (I've done that now.)

mortenjorck 4y ago

HN's headline style auto-formatter is getting weirder. Are all leading numbers removed now? Would "3,700 expected to be laid off from Twitter" become "expected to be laid off from Twitter"? I appreciate the intent of this algorithm, but I'm not convinced it's still fulfilling its original purpose.

tpmoney 4y ago
I wonder if it’s just programmed to look for clickbait listicle numbers like 5 secrets your doctor doesn’t want you to know 10 ways to grow muscle without exercising And that sort of thing. Maybe it’s even just looking for any leading number under 15 or something like that. I’d expect out of any random assortment of modern day headlines, most that start with a low number are clickbait nonsense, where something that starts with a number in the hundreds or thousands is likely to be a real article
Jtsummers 4y ago
This isn't "getting weirder", this has been the case for close to a decade if not more. HN has long removed the numbers. The good news is that the submitter has time (though in this case I think it's expired) to edit headlines for submissions, I think it's the same time window as comment editing, 1.5-2 hours. When you submit a headline and it's altered by HN in a meaningful way, you can change it back to the original.