4 ms·

You really don’t think the intent of the article was changed by this editorial choice? Or are you saying that the intent of the article was linkbait?

dang 4y ago
I don't think that was the intent of the article. I do think it was the intent of the title—it's a linkbait trope and that's why we edit it in the first place. But even without leading 'how', it's still pretty baity. A better solution would have been to drop it altogether in favor of the subtitle: "Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and the Birth of Superman". Maybe I'll do that even though it's obviously too late to make much difference.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  This is exactly why I wish you and HN would have a lighter hand with title editing. The original title is meaningful and conveys importance from the story, the automated edit makes the original title sound nefarious where it’s not, and your choice to use the subtitle strips all conveyed meaning entirely. “How Two Jewish Kids in 1930s Cleveland Altered the Course of American Pop Culture” isn’t only “baity”, there’s an incredible wealth of context in the title that gets lost if you edit it. Granted your manual edit is less obviously harmful, but it’s definitely not better than the actual title either.
  - dang 4y ago
    I think it's better because Superman is more specific than American Pop Culture. People always comment on HN title edits based on the cases that they noticed and disliked. That's not a valid generalization because it leaves out all the cases which actually improve things—those go unnoticed and unremarked on. From my point of view, meaningful discussion would have to be about what general rules or practices could improve HN's quality as a whole. For example: leave titles unedited? that would be catastrophic. Edit them differently? if so, how exactly? Edit titles such that no one is ever annoyed by an edit? impossible. Obviously the way we do it isn't perfect and there are going to be false positives no matter what we do—but I'm not aware of any other approach that would lead to significantly greater front page quality. Quite the opposite actually. One thing that also goes unremarked on is that when we see people complaining about titles, we nearly always change the title until the complaints stop. I'm sorry that didn't happen in the case of this title and your complaint—but it usually does work out. If it didn't, title complaints (either about edited titles or unedited ones) would be far more dominant here than they are. That's actually how we learned to do things this way. Community feedback is a pretty rigorous trainer.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      > That's not a valid generalization because it leaves out all the cases which actually improve things—those go unnoticed and unremarked on. I notice them all the time and I don’t remark on them most of that time because I’m trying to observe the posting guidelines and I’m loathe to open up my email client to question each one. > One thing that also goes unremarked on is that when we see people complaining about titles, we nearly always change the title until the complaints stop. That’s a fair point, but the existing practice of editing titles by default creates a fair bit of this problem and complaining comes with strong incentives to ignore the problem if you disagree with the solution. I appreciate 99.999% of how you run this community, but this one sticks in my craw a lot because it’s so well designed to confirm built in assumptions and so poorly designed for refinement. But mostly because it’s so hamfisted. Like… you have so many already built in tools for signaling that something is probably low quality without editing anything! Why not just dim the “bait” words, or even only show them to people like me who keep “showdead” on? I get a lot more from authors’ titles than I get from the externally edited version of them I often see here. So much so that I often click links I don’t even care about just because I suspect their titles are edited and I wonder what they originally said. I doubt you’ll reach the same conclusion I have (that it’s better just to not edit titles at all), but I hope you can understand that any editorial process for submissions here that alters submitted content makes all of the content suspect to me, and that I’d rather be upset by a published title than have an artificial one instead.
      - dang 4y ago
        As I said above, not editing titles at all would be catastrophic; this seems rather obvious from a quick look at the rest of the internet. HN's "bookish" (to use pg's old word) front page is the #1 thing that makes HN HN. I'm willing to try to improve it but when you call us hamfisted I feel like you're disrespecting both how hard this problem is and how much attention and care we put into it.

dang 4y ago

I don't think that was the intent of the article. I do think it was the intent of the title—it's a linkbait trope and that's why we edit it in the first place. But even without leading 'how', it's still pretty baity. A better solution would have been to drop it altogether in favor of the subtitle: "Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and the Birth of Superman". Maybe I'll do that even though it's obviously too late to make much difference.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
This is exactly why I wish you and HN would have a lighter hand with title editing. The original title is meaningful and conveys importance from the story, the automated edit makes the original title sound nefarious where it’s not, and your choice to use the subtitle strips all conveyed meaning entirely. “How Two Jewish Kids in 1930s Cleveland Altered the Course of American Pop Culture” isn’t only “baity”, there’s an incredible wealth of context in the title that gets lost if you edit it. Granted your manual edit is less obviously harmful, but it’s definitely not better than the actual title either.
- dang 4y ago
  I think it's better because Superman is more specific than American Pop Culture. People always comment on HN title edits based on the cases that they noticed and disliked. That's not a valid generalization because it leaves out all the cases which actually improve things—those go unnoticed and unremarked on. From my point of view, meaningful discussion would have to be about what general rules or practices could improve HN's quality as a whole. For example: leave titles unedited? that would be catastrophic. Edit them differently? if so, how exactly? Edit titles such that no one is ever annoyed by an edit? impossible. Obviously the way we do it isn't perfect and there are going to be false positives no matter what we do—but I'm not aware of any other approach that would lead to significantly greater front page quality. Quite the opposite actually. One thing that also goes unremarked on is that when we see people complaining about titles, we nearly always change the title until the complaints stop. I'm sorry that didn't happen in the case of this title and your complaint—but it usually does work out. If it didn't, title complaints (either about edited titles or unedited ones) would be far more dominant here than they are. That's actually how we learned to do things this way. Community feedback is a pretty rigorous trainer.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    > That's not a valid generalization because it leaves out all the cases which actually improve things—those go unnoticed and unremarked on. I notice them all the time and I don’t remark on them most of that time because I’m trying to observe the posting guidelines and I’m loathe to open up my email client to question each one. > One thing that also goes unremarked on is that when we see people complaining about titles, we nearly always change the title until the complaints stop. That’s a fair point, but the existing practice of editing titles by default creates a fair bit of this problem and complaining comes with strong incentives to ignore the problem if you disagree with the solution. I appreciate 99.999% of how you run this community, but this one sticks in my craw a lot because it’s so well designed to confirm built in assumptions and so poorly designed for refinement. But mostly because it’s so hamfisted. Like… you have so many already built in tools for signaling that something is probably low quality without editing anything! Why not just dim the “bait” words, or even only show them to people like me who keep “showdead” on? I get a lot more from authors’ titles than I get from the externally edited version of them I often see here. So much so that I often click links I don’t even care about just because I suspect their titles are edited and I wonder what they originally said. I doubt you’ll reach the same conclusion I have (that it’s better just to not edit titles at all), but I hope you can understand that any editorial process for submissions here that alters submitted content makes all of the content suspect to me, and that I’d rather be upset by a published title than have an artificial one instead.
    - dang 4y ago
      As I said above, not editing titles at all would be catastrophic; this seems rather obvious from a quick look at the rest of the internet. HN's "bookish" (to use pg's old word) front page is the #1 thing that makes HN HN. I'm willing to try to improve it but when you call us hamfisted I feel like you're disrespecting both how hard this problem is and how much attention and care we put into it.