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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

We changed the submitted title (Bill Gates: TRS-80 Model 100 “is in a sense my favorite machine”) and took the anchor off the URL (http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm#tc35).

It's against the HN guidelines to use the title and URL fields of a submission to express which detail you think is important about an article. That cherry-picking is a form of editorializing. It frames the discussion in a biased way, which is not allowed on HN. Here we want readers to make up their own minds.

If you'd like to express what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but please do it by posting a comment to the thread. That way your view will be on the same level as anyone else's. On HN (unlike some other social news sites!) being the submitter of an article confers no special right to interpret or frame it for others.

(This case seems well-intentioned, not abusive, but it's a point we've learned to insist on.)

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Right, don't you think that's a little strict? I've seen way more egregious offenses slide by here (I'm not the OP).

It might seem so, but we don't know how many similar things were fixed by moderators. Perhaps the more egregious offenses that you saw were simply overlooked?

In any case, dang was more than reasonable in his explanation and even included OP's original title and link for those who were curious. It seems like a good teaching opportunity.

Haha, yes.

It's a bit like Wikipedia or Stackoverflow. More and more "rules" get set up independent of the community, but "for the greater good".

Have you read the guidelines?

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

This paragraph has been there as far as I can remember.

It's been there since June 30, 2012. :)

Like with the Chinese rave party ex-pat detainment ordeal posted on here this weekend, it's not the rules that change, it's the enforcement that changes.

Enforcement of this rule hasn't changed at all. The only thing that's changed within the last two years is that the mods have gotten much more transparent about enforcement.

If you see them you can report them using the flag link, or maybe send an email to the mods.

Perfect consistency is too stringent a standard for HN moderation, because we can't see everything that gets posted here and it would drive one mad to try. When you do see something we've missed, we'd appreciate your telling us so we can fix it. The way to do that is to email hn@ycombinator.com because (in a nice bit of circularity) if you post it here we might not see it.

As for whether the rule itself is too strict, I really don't think so. It's rooted in long experience of what keeps this place relatively substantive, and like a number of HN's rules goes deeper and has subtler side effects than one would suppose. The principle of remaining neutral with respect to content, presenting it in a way that invites readers to make up their own minds, serves HN well. Underlying that are the principles that the reader is smart enough to do so, that it's good to ask the reader to work a little, and an emphasis on the content itself rather than the submitter.

That's not to say we never make exceptions, but the OP is a good example of where we wouldn't, hence my comment.

Oops! Sorry about that. I wasn't aware of the guideline, but I'll certainly comply in the future.

To help others follow this guideline, how about a small change to the design of the Submit page? Instead of title, maybe the first text box could be labeled original title. Or maybe add the note, "Please use original page title" after the text box.

If you all agree on doing it this way, why not fetching the title automatically and not providing a title field for link submissions at all?

That's much harder to do than it sounds and isn't a viable option. There's no substitute for editorial judgment, much as we all wish there were.

This is awesome!

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