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HN title-destroying rules strike again. It's "How Wolves Became Dogs"
by azornathogron 9mo ago
HN title-destroying rules strike again. It's "How Wolves Became Dogs"
- Luc 9mo agoThis rule is one of the worst ones, often resulting in nonsense titles or grammatical problems. Another one on the homepage right now: "Samba Was Written". Ok, great.
- rebolek 9mo agoTechnically it's correct.
- andersa 9mo agoWhy not get rid of this stupid title changer already? I don't get it.
- k8sToGo 9mo agoWhy is the how dropped? Is it automatic?
- xnorswap 9mo agoYes. There are a few other title-mangle rules that HN has. It's an attempted technical solution to try to remove / limit the amount of "clickbait" in titles. It does not work very well.
- omoikane 9mo agoI tried searching for similar incidents in the past[1], and I think the problem is that the title munging actually doesn't happen often enough for Hacker News to want to do anything about it. It's unusual that two front page articles were affected on the same day, but that's a small fraction compared to titles that passed through[2]. I don't know if Hacker News will pop up any extra confirmation to the submitter to warn that their submitted title were automatically edited, but I think that would be a better interface than relying on submitters and readers to fix the mistake after the article is already visible and ranked. Whether any automated editing of titles actually helps with reducing clickbait is a different question. [1] How wolves became dogs (2026-01-09) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553433 How Samba Was Written (2026-01-04) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551531 Why I have to give Fortnite my passport to use Bluesky (2025-12-19) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46327832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46327832 How they clean the balls in a ball pit (2025-10-15) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45592984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45592984 Why we didn't rewrite our feed handler in Rust (2025-10-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517240 How Spain put up wealth taxes (2025-08-16) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44927460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44927460 [2] Majority of the submitted titles never had "how" or "why" to begin with, and sometimes the submitter catches the change in time, for example: How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines of Code (2026-01-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545620 I didn't see any mentions of the title being edited here.
- mooreds 9mo agoIt is automatic on submission, but the submitter can go back and edit the title. I just forgot to do so.