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Ask HN: Descriptive titles or original titles?
It saddens me that high-quality content, even if it's extremely interesting for hackers, can fail to gain traction on HN because of the policy of using original article titles. The author might write a great piece that lots of us would be very interested to read, but if they don't pick a good title it will never last on HN long enough for anyone to see it. I've seen many instances where something highly interesting was on the front page of HN for a short time - until a moderator came along and changed the submission to use the original title, even if it's less descriptive. And then it bombs if the title isn't eyecatching or if it doesn't appeal specifically to the part of the content that HN would find appealing. An otherwise great article, that might have lots to appeal to HN readers, will fail for something as simple as the page title not emphasizing the part that hackers would find interesting but another part of the content.
I understand (or at least presume) that the intent of the "original titles policy" is to avoid people submitting clickbait titles just to bring undue attention to their submissions.
But isn't there a way of applying the policy in a narrower way, so that great content that isn't well-titled still stands a chance on HN?
(In my mind, I'm thinking that it should be relatively easy for mods to distinguish between title changes that are obviously clickbait, and title changes that are simply more descriptive of the content. Right now, the policy is applied in an absolute way, which is evenhanded and fair, but means we're missing out on some great stuff just because the original author titles their content generically or in a way that doesn't mention the parts that would be interesting to HN readers)
I know this has come up before, and I fully expect this post to go nowhere. But it doesn't hurt to try! I really think that descriptive titles, not original titles, should be the order of the day. Just my opinion!
- dang 12y agoCan you link to some examples of high-quality content, extremely interesting for hackers, that bombed because a moderator reverted the title?
- pzxc 12y agoWell, the reason I posted this today is because I posted a link to house.gov where you could look up the personal finances/investments of each Congressional representative. I also posted the link to the Senate version. They must be highly interesting to hackers because both links immediately got lots of upvotes -- about 30 for the HoR version and about 10 for the Senate version, within the first hour. My link was titled "House of Representatives Personal Finances" because I thought it was more descriptive than "Financial Disclosure Reports Database" which says neither whose info is being disclosed or what type of financial info it is. I carefully considered and tried to choose a title that was more descriptive but NOT clickbait. After getting over 30 upvotes and reaching spot #5 on the frontpage, one of the moderators changed the title to be the on-page title. I dunno if my post was also hit with some kind of voting-ring penalty or changed-title penalty or something else, but almost immediately it dropped to spot #31 (on page 2). Right next to a post that had the same number of upvotes but was 8 hours old instead of 1 hour old. So maybe it didn't bomb because of the worse (original) title, maybe there was some kind of penalty going on as well that could explain it. But after the title changed and it immediately went from spot #5 to spot #31, it then in the last couple of hours has received only 1 additional comment and no additional upvotes, and now I can't even find the post without going to my profile page and looking at my history. That's the example that happened this morning that was the proximate cause of this Ask HN post, but it has been on my mind for some time as I have seen it happen to other good posts too, where the title had been changed by the submitter to something more descriptive, then eventually a mod sees it and changes it to the author's title and suddenly there's a lack of interest in it and it rapidly gets pulled into the undercurrent. EDIT: Forgot to include the actual link, it's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607463 Wish I had other examples to show you, but although I've seen this happen several times in the last couple of months, it's not a daily thing and I never thought to record the links. But then I'm not on HN all day so the frequency I'm sure is higher than my own personal witnessing of it
- dang 12y agoThat drop in rank had nothing to do with the title. A moderator penalized the post, and a bunch of users flagged it, presumably because they thought it was off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8608939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8608939
- pzxc 12y agoOkay then. Thanks Dan.
- DanBC 12y agoSadly people tend to use clickbaity titles. That leads to pointless meta discussion about choice of words. I agree that I'm probably missing interesting content that is poorly named. But I support moderators / software revertg to original titles.