7 ms·
I think the biggest problem in reverting to original titles is that oftentimes, the original title is not bad, but it only makes sense in the context of the ori
by kenneth 13y ago
I think the biggest problem in reverting to original titles is that oftentimes, the original title is not bad, but it only makes sense in the context of the original blog in which it appears. In a social aggregator, it suddenly doesn't make sense anymore.
Consider this title:
A New Beginning
In the context of the PHP blog, it might indicate a change of direction of the project, a change of leadership, etc. It's a decently sensible title. On a social aggregator like HN, it is much less useful, even if printed next to a small (php.net).
We'd be better off if we let the submitted change it to:
PHP project changes direction, elects new leader
- melvinmt 13y agoWell, doesn't the domain affix (php.net) provide the context?
- aroch 13y agoNot necessarily, for example medium blogs just show 'medium.com' with no relation to the actual blog.
- nathancahill 13y agophp.net, sure, but what about more obscure domains?
- Too 13y agoHow about this one from the typescript blog? The domain is not enough to provide the context here. *Announcing 0.9.1* (blogs.msdn.com)
- 3825 13y agoTo play the devil's advocate, we already have the URL so the title (at least directly on https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com, experience on hn-android and other clients will vary): A New Beginning (us.php.net) Is that not good enough?
- anigbrowl 13y agoNo. Titles like that are often heavily biased towards regular readers of a blog/forum/interest group, and meaningless to people outside that small circle, even though the article itself may be well worth knowing about.
- cube13 13y agoGithub submissions are typically terrible with it. Especially because people use their personal repos as a blog of sorts, which means that it's hard to tell when a submission from Github is an official blog post, a code repo, or an article to read. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573101 is on the front page right now. The title is: Modeling your App's User Session (github.com) It's a blog post by Github staff about how they're now tracking user sessions with Rails, cookies, and their DB. Unfortunately, due to the way that the Github site is structured, from the title, one might think that this is a link to a library repo for user session tracking on a mobile app. A small change to the title, like "Github's modeling of user sessions" would convey the meaning of the blog post much better than the title.
- anigbrowl 13y agoThat's a good point. I've had a similar problem with submissions from google.com, which may be official google stuff or may be comment from Groups or G+ (though I think this might have been fixed by showing more of the URL, haven't checked lately).
- manuelflara 13y agoIn that case, yes. But what if the domain is somedudesname.com and that is the blog of some company's CEO? It'd be preferable to have a title like "XCompany changes direction, elects new leader".
- pbreit 13y agoBut he responded to a specific example. If you want to come up with more examples, fine. But don't tell him he's wrong or do a "yes, but".
- Fuzzwah 13y agoI've come across so many examples where a perfectly valid (imho) title has been changed to something which is basically meaningless with out the context. Here's a recent one from memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492781 The originally supplied title was something similar to: "My afternoon with a serial killer". It was changed to the "Center of the Universe" title. Clicking a link titled "Center of the Universe" one would rationally think they were about to read something by an astronomer regarding the latest hubble deep space image.
- noonespecial 13y agoThe biggest problem with this is the unavoidable editorializing. Its as likely to become PHP project takes awful turn, elects incompetent new leader.
- jlgreco 13y agoI would argue that is a lesser problem than nobody who is interested in PHP clicking through to the HN discussion because they don't have any indication that the post is about something they are interested in. Anyway, re-titling horribly editorialized posts is fine. The problem is that the person/people doing it seem to exercise little to no discretion when doing it.
- anigbrowl 13y agoThat's not unavoidable, and when I see editorializing like that it's very obvious that it's axe-grindey editorializing which I can flag and/or comment upon.
- pbreit 13y agoI think that's very potentially worse. "Changing direction" is far too opinionated.
- yoodenvranx 13y agoNo it is not worse! Even if the title is totally biased and link-baity and whatever at least I can still guess the approximate topic the article is about. Based on this I can then decide if i am interested in it or not. But with the original title this is often impossible. For example a few days ago there was a submission with the title "Beer". Since i am interested in beer I clicked on it. But instead of something interesting about beer I got a piece of alcohol fueled drama in the Ruby community which I am totally not interested in. By leaving the original title I almost always have to click on all articles on the frontpage to find the 4 or 5 articles I am interested in. Perhaps we should get rid of the complete title to make it as unbiased as possible? Just put the number 1 to 30 on a page and link them to the articles and hide the domain via javascript. This way you prevent a lot of problems... For me almost nothing would change because I already have to click on almost all the links just to figure out what's in the article and if i am interested in it.
- tlrobinson 13y agoI would prefer simply prefixing such simple titles with the missing context, e.x. PHP Blog: A New Beginning