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Why do HN mods keep changing the title from meaningful ones, which make the reader interested in the content, to generic, vague ones? You'll see that there's de

• Karunamon 12y ago
  Agreed - the original title, about a guy beating a LIDAR ticket, was much more descriptive than this headline, which effectively says "This article is about LIDAR".
  • shangxiao 12y ago
    It was the fact that the guy was Joshua Bloch which got me to read the presentation - and I'm totally glad I did! I would never have read it if it was just named "The Lowdown on Lidar"
    • puredemo 12y ago
      So appeals to authority work really well on you..
      • gwern 12y ago
        BTW, your downvotes are an opportunity to reflect on why your comment was obviously wrong and counterproductive.
  • lnanek2 12y ago
    Yeah, I had to read a lot of slides wondering why it was repeating the same thing over and over before I realized he was trying to beat a ticket. It definitely isn't a general purpose tech primer like the new title makes it sound, it's just focused on covering an error situation that gives you a legal out.
    • DanBC 12y ago
      He tells you it was about a ticket on the third slide.
• diminoten 12y ago
  What was the previous title? The current one is the same as the name of the provided link. If you don't like the title, blame the author. Mods, afaik, are just trying to follow the rule that the submission should reflect the title of the article.
  • jaredmcateer 12y ago
    I agree it was stupid of the author to not have realized his presentation to a captive audience would be linked to the public and made it a more compelling title for casual consumption
  • Alupis 12y ago
    The title I first saw was: Josh Bloch Fights a LIDAR Speeding Ticket (with Science) Which is much better than the currently edited version.
    • timdierks 12y ago
      I submitted the link with the title you note for the following three reasons: 1. Josh Bloch is an author of particular interest to this community. 2. When I searched to see if the page had already been submitted, I noted that recent HN posts on LIDAR were on technical laser ranging (e.g. in mapping applications), not on speed enforcement. 3. I thought it was an article that would be of interest to HN readers, so I thought they would be well-served by an appealing link title which conveyed the content and tone of the presentation and invited a click.
      • diminoten 12y ago
        From the guidelines: > Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important. and > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
        • 12y ago
• curtis 12y ago
  I'd really like to see more transparency when it comes to title changes. The most recent case where one of my submissions had a title change mirrors what kudu is describing here: a meaningful (and I think accurate) title changed to a generic and vague one -- followed by a rapid decline in the rate of upvotes. I think there are legitimate reasons for title changes, and I think that the Hacker News mods generally do good work. But sometimes they seem to be fixing stuff that isn't broken. I realize titles in particular can be really subjective, but that's one reason I'd like to see a comment with the old and new titles whenever a title change happens. That will allow the community to chime in when maybe the title change wasn't an improvement after all.
  • Alupis 12y ago
    > I'd really like to see more transparency I agree. From the random weighting down of certain articles, to title changes, to just flat-out removing/flaging some posts... it seems HN is becoming a "whatever the Mod who happens to be on today feels like" site -- which really detracts from the awesomeness of HN -- I'm not looking for a gatekeeper news site - if I wanted that, I'd go to CNN or something.
    • DanBC 12y ago
      You're saying mods are responsible for some things that are user actions.
      • krapp 12y ago
        If dang is concerned about the noise being caused by users complaining about the effect of certain actions (either by mods or users,) that could probably be cleared up in the UI. Something as simple as an asterisk or an automatically generated note mentioning whether a mod changed a title or user flags killed a story would possibly clear up confusion. Although the logical outcome of this would be some kind of graph generated for each thread that plots upvotes, downvotes, mod actions, user edits etc. over time but that would be insane...
    • Alupis 12y ago
• daniel_levine 12y ago
  The title has been changed to the title the original author used, which seems appropriate. I think HN's title modding is done to prevent rampant link baiting and other titling by 3rd parties, instead entrusting it with the original author
  • personZ 12y ago
    The title has been changed to the title the original author used, which seems appropriate. Titles have a context (which the author considered when they chose it). That context doesn't exist when it sits enumerated on the HN front page, invalidating the canonical title argument. For instance when the author of this piece shared this, they did so under their own twitter account (coupling it with a name), and the supporting commentary "I gave this talk at a CA traffic ticket defense attorney seminar. Comments appreciated.". If these two elements didn't exist, and it was just tossed onto some pile of titles, it would be ignored. I write a blog about software development, particularly financial and database related matters. I have vague titles like "Dealing with Variance" that makes total sense in the context of my blog and its readership, but is completely meaningless title outside of it. While I do think there has been good transparency about title changes (a mod usually comments), the whole "what the original author intended" argument is misled.
  • cfqycwz 12y ago
    I think this policy makes a lot of sense--it's best to ban editorialization of headlines altogether as there's no good objective way for mods to differentiate bad editorialization (sensationalism, inaccuracy) from good editorialization (adding pertinent information, clarifying, and de-sensationalizing). However, there is also a strong argument to be made that there are good articles with lame titles (such as this one) which would otherwise be glossed over without a title change. Maybe the best solution would be to add a summary field to submissions, restricted to an 80-character, purely factual synopsis of the article's contents. It could show up smaller, beneath the submission headline, like a subtitle. This way, you gain the benefits of editorialization (providing pertinent info highlighting the article's appeal to HN readers) while minimizing most of the downsides (loss of info provided in the title, misconstruction of the author's intent).
  • 12y ago
• squeaky-clean 12y ago
  I saw the earlier title of this post while flipping through HN on my phone, and I wanted to read the full article during my lunch break. Now here I am, I checked the front page and was very confused where the post I was interested in went, and why some post apparently describing Lidar is at the top. I guess they're trying to keep the title to match the title of the link/article. But sometimes the article just has a bad title. This slideshow is a great read, but with a title that puts me to sleep.
  • grandalf 12y ago
    I had the same experience exactly.
  • NDizzle 12y ago
    I too have the same experience. It's not possible to mentally queue up items to read throughout the day. All the titles will have changed by that point.
• GHFigs 12y ago
  Alternate questions: Why do authors keep using generic and vague titles? Why do submitters keep submitting content with generic and vague titles?
  • KC8ZKF 12y ago
    Anything else is declared misleading linkbait.
  • kybernetikos 12y ago
    A title for someone who is already reading your blog fulfills a different purpose to a title for someone on an aggregator.
• DanBC 12y ago
  "Why do we revert to orginal titles" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466 The question has been asked, and answered, very many times. The guidelines have advice about threads like these: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • kudu 12y ago
    "We don't do this because it's too inflexible. [...] In others the subtitle makes a better title. But the fact that a title field is editable doesn't make it comment." The original title of the post wasn't a comment on the content, but rather somewhat of a subtitle, which provided a better description.
• kudu 12y ago
  FYI, the original title was "Josh Bloch Fights a LIDAR Speeding Ticket (with Science)". Whereas that title gave information about the intention and action of the author (fighting a ticket), the updated title is relatively bland and refers to LIDAR in general.
• robert_tweed 12y ago
  A few days ago I commented about how an HN title had made me expect that the Amazon 3D printing store was 3D printing as a service, which alas, it is not. The mods changed the title, which in that case made it less misleading, but they didn't leave any comment to say what the old title was. My comment no longer made any sense, and because a few hours had passed, I couldn't edit it to add a footnote for confused readers (and plus, I couldn't remember the precise wording of the original title). I can understand why the titles are sometimes changed and most of the time I think it's for the better (although this time I agree it was a bad choice). What I would like to see added is a changelog feature, so that whenever the mods change a title, a footnote appears directly below the summary, before comments, showing who changed the title, what it had been, and optionally the reason it was changed.
• BrandonMarc 12y ago
  Agreed ... the title mentioning a guy using LIDAR (and Science!) to dispute a traffic ticket is completely different from a title that says "here's how LIDAR works". I agree, some transparency, or at least a history of previous titles, would be helpful. Hell, lots of times I'll load 10 HN threads in my browser, to read later ... and then later when I get to them I refresh to start with the latest comments, look at the headline, and think "Um? When did I click on this? And where's that thread about ___? I think I clicked on that before ..."
• adamtj 12y ago
  I would assume such changes come from a desire to be accurate. But accurate how? In what way? That depends on the purpose of the title. As I see it, our differences of opinion on this topic stem largely from misunderstanding it. I think it's not at all clear what we're even talking about, so we wind up arguing about slightly different things and fail to come to a consensus. I think that we need to really understand the purpose of these titles, and to also understand that different people mean different things by the word "title". In fact, I think we're talking about three distinct but related ideas: titles, names, and summaries. A name is a word or phrase that identifies a thing. A name isn't necessarily descriptive and often has no more meaning than being a word or phrase denoting the thing it names. My name is Adam. That tells you very little about me. All you can do with that is to identify me. A summary describes a thing. I am a software developer with a penchant for pedantry. That's a summary. It actually tells you something about my nature, which the name "Adam" does not. A title is first and foremost a kind of name. Ideally, it's also a descriptive summary, though that's not required. As a name, the important thing is that it is as short and as unique as reasonable. That's more important that descriptiveness. In my opinion, Hacker News links should not be titles, i.e. names, but rather short summaries. Using a title is fine, but only as long as it's also a good summary. The point of the front page is to link to things that are new and fresh. Ideally, most people won't have seen most things, meaning few will be familiar with their names. A page of new names that nobody recognizes is pretty pointless. You might as well use randomly generated words for the links. Or numbers. Like item?id=8114336. Instead of titles, I think links should be summaries. When they are summaries, they can provide some real information about the thing that is linked. That can be used to decide whether to invest time in clicking through. When a link is just a name, you have little information to base that decision on, so you have to click most of the links to know which are the interesting ones. But, if all HN links are summaries, how will we know what to call the articles they link? Well, if the summary is interesting enough to want to talk about, you'll click the link and see the actual title. Names are unimportant on the HN front page. They only become useful in the comments, and by then you should have at least read the title of the article, if not the whole thing. The original summary here was useful and information-packed without being too long: "Josh Bloch Fights a LIDAR Speeding Ticket (with Science)". I care that it's Josh Bloch. I care that he's using science, in court. I care that it's about LIDAR and not RADAR. The fact that it's Josh Bloch, and that he's using science to fight a ticket means he was probably wrongfully ticketed, implying weaknesses in LIDAR speed guns that I want to understand. I got all that from a good, short summary. The new summary is just the title of the linked article, which in this case is mostly just a name: "The Lowdown on Lidar". So, it's about LIDAR generally? Or as opposed to RADAR? Given the use of "lowdown", it's probably it's about some stuff that isn't commonly known. Maybe. Or maybe it's a boring, entry-level article on range finding in general that happens to talk about LIDAR rather than RADAR or SONAR. The title tells me very little and is not helpful in deciding whether to click the link, though it is a good name that's short and easy to use when talking about the article. I enjoyed reading "The Lowdown on Lidar". The most important and useful thing a main page link can do is to accurately and faithfully inform the reader about the contents of the link. Accurately naming the linked thing is neither important nor useful. That is especially not useful when the name given by the original author misrepresents the contents, as is sometimes the case. Accuracy is important in general, but we must be clear about specifically which kind of accuracy matters most here.
• na85 12y ago
  This isn't reddit where sensationalizing your submission titles is encouraged. Submitters on HN should not be abusing the submission title to gain a privileged place in the discussion (i.e. editorials at the top of the page, unable to be affected by voting in the comments). If you have an opinion on a submission, submit a comment to it.
• dang 12y ago
  That doesn't seem like a genuine question. As for your factual claim, the post has been sitting near the top of the front page for 16 hours now.