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Ask HN: How hard would it be to allow 120 character titles?
Hacker News currently limits submission titles to 80 characters. Brevity is often good, but I've found 80 characters painfully short more than a few times -- especially for science articles. I can't imagine that it would be technically difficult and I don't think we're likely to see any major increase in title abuse (Reddit-style editorializing in the title, for example) since the HN community is pretty ruthless about flagging submissions if they see a problem.
- chris_j 12y agoDo you have any examples of specific articles with titles that would benefit from a longer limit?
- curtis 12y agoHere's a couple of examples from my submission history. I've probably got better examples if I search farther back. a) Isaac Asimov wrote a “paper” about a time-hopping compound called thiotimoline b) In 1947 Isaac Asimov wrote a hilarious spoof of scientific papers about a time-hopping compound called thiotimoline The first version is the title I submitted under. The second title is the one I would have liked to use. The first is 78 characters and the second is 115. Here's another one (66 and 115 characters): a) Saroo’s Google-Earth Quest: How an Orphaned Boy Found His Way Home b) Years after getting lost at a train station, Saroo searched for his birth home using hazy memories and Google Earth Another thing of note is that you can often squeeze a title down to 80 characters or less, but it really takes a lot of time.
- chris_j 12y agoFor me, I don't think that the longer titles are any better than the shorter ones, at least for the examples that you give above. Looking at the articles themselves, they have completely different titles to the ones that you picked (both the short and longer versions). This goes against the Hacker News Guidelines [0] which state: "...Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." Indeed, a general rule on Hacker News is not to editorialize headlines (ie make up headlines that look good in order to attract people to click on the link). This does of course raise the question of whether the Hacker News Guidelines are a good idea or not and I am torn on this one. On the one hand, I suppose there are occasions where a headline can be made clearer and more useful by rewriting it. On the other hand, I see the current guidelines as a backlash against the state of linkbait headlines on Reddit when Hacker News was first created all those years ago. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cogburnd02 12y agoWell, this would be weird for those who use terminal clients that assume the 80 character limit,(if any exist) on 80-column-wide hardware terminals.
- krapp 12y agoI know it's Hacker News and there are likely to be more such users than average, and probably just enough to be worth worrying about. But maybe they (kogir, dang, whomever) can add ?cols=n as a parameter or something so they can adjust it to their heart's content. Most of us have room for 80 characters and plenty to spare.
- krapp 12y agoOr at the very least, add tooltips to the title links on the list views (comments, new, etc) so we can read the entire title when they get truncated. For example: Ask HN: How hard would it be to allow 120 characte... why?