5 ms·
I will just quote what I said a few days ago: It's worse than that. Since you can't editorialize titles and some authors like to give their articles poetic, me
by sker 13y ago
I will just quote what I said a few days ago:
It's worse than that. Since you can't editorialize titles and some authors like to give their articles poetic, meaningless names like "A butterfly in the sky," when the actual article talks about a security exploit in Bitcoin, coded in Go and released by Wikileaks.
I often find myself ignoring interesting articles on HN only to go read them later on reddit with a much more descriptive, editorialized headline.
Right now there's a good example of this problem on the front page. The article about the Android/PRNG security flaw is aptly editorialized as "Google confirms Java and OpenSSL crypto PRNG on Android are broken," but the original article is titled "Some SecureRandom Thoughts," which is meaningless and I would never have clicked it under any circumstances. Thankfully the mods left this one alone.
- Ologn 13y agoI did a submission from the New York Times about how the IRS was targeting open source groups, and the title said as much. The title was changed to "Documents show liberals in IRS dragnet". So I had to write a short HN-adapted blog post on my blog and redundantly submit that as well.
- derefr 13y agoIt's kind of funny, I find myself doing the opposite--when I see a completely meaningless title on the HN front page, I assume it's actually something much more interesting and a mod de-editorialized it into meaninglessness, so I click through to see what it is.
- Drakim 13y agoBut that's not a road we want to walk down, imagine if every title was meaningless! The point of titles should be to give an informing mini-summary about the topic.
- derefr 13y agoIt wouldn't be that bad--being on the front page is itself a prequalification, and being on the front page despite having a meaningless title means it's on the front page for reasons other than being linkbait. Removing titles altogether might make things more meritocratic, actually (if a little more painful for the people who only click things if they're about a certain topic.)
- brador 13y agoIt's trust. Over time you learn to trust the HN headlines for accuracy. Editorialization leads to overhyping junk articles for clicks.
- Supermighty 13y agoI didn't realize it until just now, but I ignore the meaningless titles. I come to HN to catch up on the news first, and save the fluff later. It would be nice if every title accurately described what it was about so I could make better decisions about what to read now, what to read later, and what to pass over.
- quadhome 13y agoThe article about the Android/PRNG security flaw is aptly editorialized... Thank you. I revised the title for that link several times. My final edit lifted the style of the Ars Technica[1] headline, but specifically added the more technical "Java and OpenSSL crypto PRNG" that I worried would be incomprehensible to the layman... Though, the mods did remove my trailing "." from text. ;-) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6215972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6215972