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> even if it's not obvious what it's about from that title Tangent, but: I wish Hacker News was a bit less dogmatic about preferring the original site's title
by ytpete 1y ago
> even if it's not obvious what it's about from that title
Tangent, but: I wish Hacker News was a bit less dogmatic about preferring the original site's title over any better semantic summary the submitter might offer. Blog posts and news headlines have a strong incentive to be clickbait-ey or just plain catchy, which often makes them less informative and in turn makes the HN homepage harder to scan for interesting posts.
It also feels like an arbitrary dividing line where if the original title is too long to fit HN's max limit, the submitter edits it and their take on what's a good summary stands. But if the original title could fit, the submitter's headline is often overwritten with the article title by mods even if it's less useful.
- zahlman 1y agoAgreed. I feel awkward sharing my blog here, because I title my posts to appeal to a hypothetical regular audience, but I'm trying to build a regular audience by showing it to non-regulars who lack the context to interpret the title. (Or rather: I want the title to be sensible and entertaining in hindsight.)
- taneq 1y agoCould you title your posts in a HN-friendly style and subtitle them with your actual preferred title? And then (if this wouldn’t be considered Poor Form) swap back to the original title once it’s dropped off the front page?
- zahlman 1y agoPossibly, but I already use title and subtitle in other ways. I suppose I could create aliases and redirects instead.
- smcin 1y agoAgreed. That's the second in the last few days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880951
- qwertox 1y agoI just thought about this 10 minutes ago, when I saw the top post "Mycoria is an open and secure overlay network that connects all participants". The actual title of the page is "Mycoria". I actually wanted to thank the submitter for extending the title to something meaningful, but thought that it would be a too low value-adding comment.