Ask HN: Why do article titles arbitrarily change?

4 points by emingo 13 years ago | 6 comments

And who does the changing? I've noticed several articles titles changing throughout the day. I also remember that one story I posted had the title changed. Just wondering!

eranation 13 years ago |

I believe it's HN mods who change titles that don't comply to the guidelines (e.g. misleading title) usually they just change the title to the title of the article.

krapp 13 years ago | |

I wonder why the script doesn't just try to parse the metadata (and maybe H1) from the submitted site? That would impartially cover most cases, I think.

mcintyre1994 13 years ago | | |

If a title is misleading or linkbait, we're meant to adjust it on submission. It'd be a good idea if the rule were just that you must use original titles, but it's a bit more nuanced and does seem to need some human oversight.

tokenadult 13 years ago |

The Hacker News welcome message

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One of the guidelines is to prefer submitting original article titles:

"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.

. . . .

"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

The Hacker News FAQ

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

emingo 13 years ago | |

hm I read that thing when I joined, but I guess memory is a funny thing!

Thanks for the answer :)