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I believe people refer to this as blog spam, right? From the HN guidelines: Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on

I believe people refer to this as blog spam, right? From the HN guidelines: Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

cbhl 13y ago
Right, but the guidelines are developed from people doing undesirable things to the detriment of HN. (Presumably, submitting blog spam and the front page being full of ten blog spam pages that have the same title and all point back to a single source.) If (as the critics suggest) the combination of "submit original source" and "use original title" are making HN worse, we can adjust our behaviour and change the guidelines. What I'm advocating is that people submit "blog spam" only when: 1. The submitter is absolutely certain that the original source has a title that makes no sense out of context, 2. The submitter wants to editorialize the title because of (1), and, 3. The submitter owns the blog that has the "blog spam" post (i.e. they don't submit blog spam from TechCrunch or Kotaku or what-have-you unless they actually write for TC/Kotaku/etc.) If a "blog spam" post makes it to the front page way more often than the original source because of editorialized titles, then that is the decision of the collective HN community. I suspect that it rarely will. As a bonus, if the new approach works well, maybe we can switch to an automated title-scraper. I agree that there may be a short-term increase in blogspam, but this approach lets the people who are upset about title-changing see for themselves which title was most useful to HN readers. I hypothesize that in the long run, people who write factually incorrect editorialized titles will learn the hard way (because their "blog spam" doesn't get upvoted) and eventually go back to submitting original sources (and maybe they'll stop complaining about title reverts to boot). And, in either case, this removes the need for mods to revert titles, which (hopefully) is win-win.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I think that this proposal would ultimately be to the detriment of HN. I don't want to have to click through your blog to get to the article, even if you have the purest of intentions and aren't just looking for ad impressions, just because HN moderators cannot be arsed to exercise discretion when re-titling posts. I want to be able to read a link, get a reasonable impression of what content is behind it and why it was posted, click it once, and then read the content. Anything else is a sub-par user experience.
  - cbhl 13y ago
    Fair enough. What do you propose submitters should do if the page's original title doesn't give you a "reasonable impression of what content is behind it"? Simply not submit the article altogether?
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      I think that submitters should edit titles if they think the original titles are unreasonable. If moderators think that the edited title is unreasonable, they could revert or otherwise change it. Basically, everyone should operate as the rules claim they should operate. The problem is that moderators semi-regularly edit titles that really didn't have editorial twist to be completely uninformative. As far as I am concerned, there isn't a policy problem, there is a moderator problem.

I believe people refer to this as blog spam, right? From the HN guidelines: Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

cbhl 13y ago

Right, but the guidelines are developed from people doing undesirable things to the detriment of HN. (Presumably, submitting blog spam and the front page being full of ten blog spam pages that have the same title and all point back to a single source.) If (as the critics suggest) the combination of "submit original source" and "use original title" are making HN worse, we can adjust our behaviour and change the guidelines. What I'm advocating is that people submit "blog spam" only when: 1. The submitter is absolutely certain that the original source has a title that makes no sense out of context, 2. The submitter wants to editorialize the title because of (1), and, 3. The submitter owns the blog that has the "blog spam" post (i.e. they don't submit blog spam from TechCrunch or Kotaku or what-have-you unless they actually write for TC/Kotaku/etc.) If a "blog spam" post makes it to the front page way more often than the original source because of editorialized titles, then that is the decision of the collective HN community. I suspect that it rarely will. As a bonus, if the new approach works well, maybe we can switch to an automated title-scraper. I agree that there may be a short-term increase in blogspam, but this approach lets the people who are upset about title-changing see for themselves which title was most useful to HN readers. I hypothesize that in the long run, people who write factually incorrect editorialized titles will learn the hard way (because their "blog spam" doesn't get upvoted) and eventually go back to submitting original sources (and maybe they'll stop complaining about title reverts to boot). And, in either case, this removes the need for mods to revert titles, which (hopefully) is win-win.

jlgreco 13y ago
I think that this proposal would ultimately be to the detriment of HN. I don't want to have to click through your blog to get to the article, even if you have the purest of intentions and aren't just looking for ad impressions, just because HN moderators cannot be arsed to exercise discretion when re-titling posts. I want to be able to read a link, get a reasonable impression of what content is behind it and why it was posted, click it once, and then read the content. Anything else is a sub-par user experience.
- cbhl 13y ago
  Fair enough. What do you propose submitters should do if the page's original title doesn't give you a "reasonable impression of what content is behind it"? Simply not submit the article altogether?
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    I think that submitters should edit titles if they think the original titles are unreasonable. If moderators think that the edited title is unreasonable, they could revert or otherwise change it. Basically, everyone should operate as the rules claim they should operate. The problem is that moderators semi-regularly edit titles that really didn't have editorial twist to be completely uninformative. As far as I am concerned, there isn't a policy problem, there is a moderator problem.