3 ms·
Why does HN monkey with titles like this?
by SevenNation 4y ago
Why does HN monkey with titles like this?
- dang 4y agoThe 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.)