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 definitely a correlation between the moment that HN mods change the title and the post dropping off the top frontpage spot.
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.
"I'd really like to see more transparency when it comes to title changes."
I think dang is working hard to be transparent about this topic. You can see a number of examples of this by reading through the following search result [1].
Cases in point:
He has reverted titles to their original form... "Ok, we'll change the title back again." [2]
He is open to suggestions...
"If anyone suggests a better title, I'll change it again." [3]
"That's a fair suggestion and we changed the title accordingly." [4]
"We'd happily change the title if someone can propose a more accurate and neutral one." [5]
Title changes are a perennial point of friction. Much time and energy by many parties has been spent over months debating and analyzing it.
Why not just implement a title history feature? Mods can change title, then users can click a link to show title history.
For extra points, you could make the title history page a poll/voting system which allows users above n karma, registered for x months to vote on their preferred title. Top voted title after y votes and z time after initial title change is what's used.
I definitely like the option of a title history + voting on which you believe is a "better" title. I also agree that limiting it to a certain threshold of karma, account age, etc, is appropriate.
Interesting to see these comments about transparency suddenly (after an entire 12 hour period) slide waaaaay down the page... I think this is the very [lack of] transparency we are talking about!
> I'd really like to see more transparency when it comes to title changes
So would I. Last time I mentioned this I got my head bit off (that's how it's always been!!). I don't care. It could AND SHOULD be better and WILL be if we demand it.
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.
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...
Some wikipedia editors found a new home. Sometimes, people in a position of power, need some reassuring of that position by exercising the power. Most of the time however, the strong ones don't need that reassurance.
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.
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".
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"
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
On Reddit, people post short summaries as titles. It isn't a good idea. A boring title may not be descriptive, but it's prescriptive: it prevents tainting the conversation. People shouldn't go into an article with a mindset established by a summary written by a random user. That privilege should be reserved for the author.
Why not have mods vet the summaries, like they do with titles? Because it'd be way too much work to do that for all articles. Dozens make it to the frontpage each day. And then we'll run into situations where the mods haven't vetted a summary at night (because they're sleeping) so some linkbaity summary flairs up to the frontpage for no good reason. This is exactly what happens on Reddit, and it's the reason HN should maintain its current rule regarding titles.
Good content, not good titles, should define HN as a community.
But, HN titles are content. They are part of the conversation about the article. I agree that authors should be able to title and summarize their own work, but only in that work. They shouldn't be given any special control of the conversation about that work, which is what HN is.
I don't see the purpose of having mods vet all titles or summaries. I don't think titles need any special blessing by an elite caste of users. I don't think it's important that titles be in any way "official" or even neutral.
Perhaps I'm not concerned because I also don't see duplicate posts as being especially bad. Maybe they are a bit annoying sometimes, but there are worse problems in the world. Why not simply embrace duplicates and let the best title rise to the top? Certainly people occasionally post comments saying essentially the same thing. There, we just let the voting system do what it does and push the best version to the top. Why not do that with titles as well? The only problem I can see is that conversations may be fragmented -- but copy/paste is super easy. Links in comments are easy to create and to follow.
The only real need I see for moderators is to occasionally deal with a flagrantly abusive link. Even that is questionable.
I think people are smart. We're mostly adults here, and we aren't easily controlled with blatantly editorialized links. I don't see any danger that we need protection from.
Ah, thank you. That's what I assumed the policy was, but I wasn't sure if it was implicit or explicit. Now I know.
I guess the point I'm attempting to argue is that this particular policy is suboptimal and should be changed. Of course, when a policy or consensus exists, we should follow it. When it's a bad policy, we should follow it until we change it or remove it. I think we should change this.
My position basically boils down to a worse-is-better argument. I think the desire to maximize accuracy with original titles actually harms the conversation more than inaccuracies and editorializing in information-packed summaries.
What matters to me in this case is the signal-to-noise ratio, not the absolute level of noise in the data. Original titles can be "cleaner" and less noisy, but they also have relatively little information, or signal. I would rather have twice the noise if it gives me three times the signal.
I even see the noise as useful in a way. It adds color. Even when a title is inaccurate, it's sometimes interesting to think about how or why it is inaccurate. A little mess never killed anybody, and can even keep us healthy. Ultimately, if I'm so busy I don't have enough time to be occasionally mislead by a click-bait title, then I don't really have time to spend on HN in the first place.
I think the right way to deal with inaccurate titles is either to simply ignore them, or maybe to downvote them and to upvote duplicate posts with better titles. But won't HN then turn into reddit? I don't think so.
See, I think we try to fix too many things with laws where we should instead use social pressure. The reason that Americans don't litter very much isn't that it's now a ticketable offense. It's that we have decided that litterers are idiots and everybody hates them. The reason many subreddits are cesspools isn't the lack of rules, it's that they're populated by people who haven't collectively figured out a better way to behave -- or who don't particularly value the benefits of that different behavior. Adding a new rule won't fix anything if people don't understand and accept the purpose behind the rule. And if they understand the purpose, they usually don't need the rule.
Someone could argue that HN is something of a cesspool because so many comment threads go off topic. Like this one. Some people despise that. In general, though, HN users generally seem to appreciate an off-topic conversation so long as it's adding value. What we don't approve of is comments that don't add value. But, we don't need rules for that. It's just our commonly accepted behavior. Other groups have different values, and that's ok.
Plenty of subreddits have rules about editorialising titles and introducing bias, and they work well depending on the community.
But I'd rather have the odd editorialised title slipping through, than a large collection of bland, meaningless and decontextualised link titles. The current situation makes HN titles far inferior.
If that is your aim, why not just use random numbers for titles? Or make all titles identical? That would certainly bring down the number of users by decreasing the pleasure of using the site, and repel new users.
I saw the title and google link and thought it would be someone from Google talking about the LIDAR system they use in their self-driving cars. I'd actually just read an article that said they cost $70,000 each so I was thinking "Maybe they have a way to drastically reduce the price or are going to say why they can't".
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 ..."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The submitter didn't do this.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
Guidelines != rules. Sometimes authors write poor headlines (this is a great example). The community benefits from headlines that are more descriptive of the article. Having mods change them back for consistency's sake harms HN more than it helps.
I'd rather not be on a website that takes itself so seriously that people obsess over rules/guidelines. It seems like every popular post has this confusion and argument about changing titles.
The original title is, indeed, misleading. The article is not about LIDAR specifically, but about how LIDAR is (mis)used in speed enforcement. IMO, the title change was warranted.
I think at this point your beef is with PG himself, or whoever he had write those guidelines.
The thing the mods are trying to avoid is link baiting, and they tend to err on the side of "no exceptions". I prefer this, as any other option may lead to more unintentional bias, or worse.
I suppose that "Josh Bloch Fights a LIDAR Speeding Ticket (with Science)" is a bit more link bait-y than "The Lowdown on LIDAR". I would also argue that the former compactly explains the entire content of the article, much more so than the latter, especially given that the author claims no expertise on LIDAR.
Regardless, I still would have preferred the original title. Perhaps removing the reference to Josh Bloch (and, perhaps, the parenthetical "with science") could have been dropped to reduce its link baity-ness.
As an addendum, I clicked on the link and read the article after the title had been changed to match the article's title, so perhaps my stated preference, as an afterthought, is completely unfounded.
"The Lowdown on LIDAR (Josh Blochs presentation)" is 47 chars and would probably have been kept.
Your title is link-baity. "Beats speeding ticket" and "with science" are obvious link bait. I'm kind of surprised that you thought your replacements would stick.
How would a reader know that this has to do with speeding radar, and not LIDAR use in ranging / mapping?
And I think it's relevant that the content of the presentation is scientific/analytic, rather than related to using legal strategies to invalidate a speeding ticket, for example.
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
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
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).
No, it's not appropriate here as the title only mentions "LIDAR", which I'm sure most of us have no idea what it means and won't care enough to read about it, whereas the original title gave context and desire to find out more.
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.
