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Original title: "A Drupal Developer is Dying and Needs Your Help." The new title reduces the information and context about the article by several orders of mag

Original title: "A Drupal Developer is Dying and Needs Your Help." The new title reduces the information and context about the article by several orders of magnitude, which is a tragedy given the gravity of the situation. To all who read this comment, please upvote the OP so that it stays on the front page longer and signals "must read" with its large number of upvotes. This heavy-handed re-titling of HN posts has got to stop. If any incident can clearly demonstrate why, this is it.

jellicle 14y ago
This is exactly correct. Information content in headlines is important, and clearly the moderator is incompetent at this role. You have to tell people why they should care, and the target page title probably is NOT good at that. In 99% of cases, the target page title will be a bad title on HN. If the moderator disliked the direct appeal for aid in the original headline (I speculate, since he has not deigned to defend his editing), a proper title would be something along the lines of "Drupal developer has ALS, appeals for help". If Winborn is better known, you could go with "Drupal developer Winborn has ALS, appeals for help". If he's very widely known, you can assume most readers know who he is and go with "Aaron Winborn has ALS, appeals for help". This conveys all the information needed for readers to evaluate the link, without being a direct emotional appeal. I'd be happy to give the HN moderators a class in editing if they like. Editing is a learnable skill. Or, more likely, the HN moderators can continue fucking it up.
- deleted 14y ago
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- evolve2k 14y ago
  Mods need to take account of context when reviewing titles. The context the original title in the blog post is totally different from here on HN hence the desirability of a different title. It's just good UX to take into consideration the different end user.
daeken 14y ago
You know, I'd put $20 down that a moderator wrote a script that scrapes the front page every N minutes and then compares titles on the submission to the title of the link and fixes it if they differ. It was probably just a quick experiment, much like many of the changes on HN.

jellicle 14y ago

This is exactly correct. Information content in headlines is important, and clearly the moderator is incompetent at this role. You have to tell people why they should care, and the target page title probably is NOT good at that. In 99% of cases, the target page title will be a bad title on HN. If the moderator disliked the direct appeal for aid in the original headline (I speculate, since he has not deigned to defend his editing), a proper title would be something along the lines of "Drupal developer has ALS, appeals for help". If Winborn is better known, you could go with "Drupal developer Winborn has ALS, appeals for help". If he's very widely known, you can assume most readers know who he is and go with "Aaron Winborn has ALS, appeals for help". This conveys all the information needed for readers to evaluate the link, without being a direct emotional appeal. I'd be happy to give the HN moderators a class in editing if they like. Editing is a learnable skill. Or, more likely, the HN moderators can continue fucking it up.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
evolve2k 14y ago
Mods need to take account of context when reviewing titles. The context the original title in the blog post is totally different from here on HN hence the desirability of a different title. It's just good UX to take into consideration the different end user.

daeken 14y ago

You know, I'd put $20 down that a moderator wrote a script that scrapes the front page every N minutes and then compares titles on the submission to the title of the link and fixes it if they differ. It was probably just a quick experiment, much like many of the changes on HN.