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The most egregious case of title manipulation that I recall was when the submission of a blog post that broke the airbnb scandal [1] was renamed. The title of
by mcphilip 13y ago
The most egregious case of title manipulation that I recall was when the submission of a blog post that broke the airbnb scandal [1] was renamed. The title of the blog post was too generic to attract interest and gave no indication that it was related to airbnb [2]. The submission's title was originally something like "Airbnb user's home wrecked". The title of the HN submission was changed to the blog post's vague title of "Violated: a traveler's lost faith, a difficult lesson learned."
I get that HN doesn't want editorialized submission titles (e.g. /r/politics), but if a title is too vague to warrant attention, what's the harm in submitting it to HN in a manner that gives it context?
[1]http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/the-moment-of-truth-for-airbnb-as-users-home-is-utterly-trashed/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/the-moment-of-truth-for-air...
[2]http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travelers-lost-faith-difficult.html http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travele...
- nonchalance 13y agoThe cynic would say that AirBnB is a YC company and HN doesn't want to draw attention to negative news, which makes sense (if you were the operator of this or any site, you wouldn't want bad news to surface)
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoThose who believe in cock-up before conspiracy would say there is a 'bot running round changing submission titles to <title> tags, given a certain SOUNDEX gap (ie if the title is close enough, leave it, else call it editorialised) It might be feasible to test this by changing titles a lot. A mean person could build titles ("AAA AAA") to discover the algo. Whatever. Bit of a tangent.
- k3n 13y agoHah, haven't heard it as "cock-up before conspiracy" before, which seems to be a rather amusing way of stating Hanlon's razor[1]. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoWell, I don't drink in the sort of pubs where a sentence beginning "Never attribute to malice" will be allowed to finish, but a sentence with cock and up in it will happily run its course.