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Appreciate the response - thanks!

What about people who just click on links and don't view comments? Won't they be missing out just because the discussion in the comments isn't great?

Story quality and comment quality have mystical connections.

-1 to the title change. The current title doesn't convey the situation effectively and imo serves to hide the true nature of the incident. There isn't really an article title to source from here, anyway.

Here's what I just emailed to a user who asked about the same thing:

I think people can pretty well figure out what the story is from the linked page and the HN comments. No?

There's a downside to spelling things out completely—it gets people out of the habit of doing their own work to figure things out. Admittedly it can sometimes be helpful for getting a story attention in the first place, but once it's on the front page, there's nearly always a good reason for that, and it's good to expect readers to have to dig a little sometimes to find it.

Edit: There's another aspect too. When a title uses language that isn't from the article itself, it typically departs from the article in ways that subtly reframe it into something it isn't. (This is also the case with many media pieces whose headlines are not written by their authors.) For example, the courtroom tone of the submitted title frames this story as a grave breach of trust and leaves out the (I'll be generous) equally important aspect that this is a Reddit shitshow and nothing about it can be taken completely seriously.

This is an important effect to avoid, and sticking to language from the article itself is the way to avoid it.

>There's a downside to spelling things out completely

Are you gonna make every title a puzzle? Or change the title back? Or keep your YC-serving contradiction?

I didn't know who "spez" was until this incident! The title should at least say Reddit! This is a terribly mystifying and non-descriptive title and the previous one was completely accurate.

EDIT WITH REPLY TO THE FOLLOWING:

I only found this thread because I searched "reddit" to see what the discussion was here after reading about this incident in the Yahoo News article. That means I would have passed right over it and not known this article was about Reddit if I had started here because I didn't know what u/spez was yet.

And the title you gave this isn't even a title from the content, it's a partial quote of a line from within the body of a comment underneath a page with a completely different title. All the examples you linked were to pages with titles that were then used or lightly trimmed into the title here (possibly with a year added).

Exactly.

It's like having having some obscure one word titles on the front page for some company/software/hardware/whatever that I have never heard of and the link content does not make it much more clear either.

Some readers want HN to prepare everything for them like mother birds who chew the worms for their babies. That's not how HN works. Here it's good for readers to have to work a little.

Ok, here you go: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

I hadn't seen it before, but your reaction to 'tl;dr' at the end of that search in the Privacy Badger thread is fantastic (which is to say, it matches my own feelings): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7789697. Are you still fighting the good fight, or have you since given in?

Still fighting! But I restrain myself from commenting about it.

Oh you guys.

No, we're not gonna "make every title a puzzle"—that would be "the opposite extreme".

This has no effect on YC pro or con, it's too inconsequential. Also, we don't moderate HN to be YC-serving. See my comment upthread. Doing so would not be YC-serving anyhow, just idiotic.

Domain names are part of the title on HN, so the title does say Reddit.

I'm glad you know who "spez" is now! See, that wasn't so hard!

FWIW I like the moderation. It's made me think before hitting [reply], and I try a little bit harder to avoid the obvious shit-show threads now.

About titles: I see you get complaints about titles. I'm not sure if people understand how often commentors will respond to the title. I've submitted articles and seen that people haven't read the article but have responded directly to the title.

But also, it's pretty hard for submitters to understand what to change about a title. And the desire to provide a descriptive title is strong, and there are no reminders when submitting about not doing that.

> There's a downside to spelling things out completely

Are you gonna make every title a puzzle?

No, it doesn't need to be all of them --- just enough to provide a healthy level of 'environmental enrichment'. I presume you are familiar with the 'herding cats' metaphor for programmers. Well, we're the cats, and 'dang' is the herder.

Environmental enrichment encourages the use of "puzzle feeders" that require the cats to practice their hunting instincts rather than expecting their meals to be provided to them in a bowl: http://www.catbehaviorassociates.com/the-benefits-of-using-p...

(at least, that's the way I've always viewed it)

> Are you gonna make every title a puzzle?

What's life without puzzles? That's why we are hackers right?

Honestly I feel like all this boils down to "I'm friends with spez" and I don't like that. You are suppressing this story. Ironically your moderation in this thread is pretty similar to the behavior on Reddit that's being called out in the first place.

You're imagining things you don't like and then not liking them. I'm not sure I can help much, but I'll try.

I'm not friends with Steve. I was introduced to him years ago, when we went through YC, and that's it. I'd be shocked if he remembered.

Moderators put the story back on the front page, so obviously we weren't trying to suppress it. The thread has over 600 points and over 600 comments now and there is at least one repost nearly as big.

I reverted the title because that's standard practice on HN and spent most of my evening in here patiently trying to explain that to you and others. Actually, normally I'd just do a why bother and give people the title they clamour for, but something about this case struck me as ridiculous, and I'm not going to throw years of moderation practice out the window just because Reddit culture had one of its tantrums here. The reason I feel that way has nothing to do with this particular story; it has to do with the principles of this place, which it's my job to protect.

(If you must know, I actually kind of like it when Reddit shitshows hit HN. The hivemind usually only has indignation for one forum's management at a time. I feel a little guilty about this, but when the wasps go off in a frenzy and are busy stinging someone else, I can't help but enjoy it that, at least for a little while, they're not stinging me. Also, when Reddit is the story I get to do as the Romans do and joke a little. Just a little though.)

No, reverting a title is not "similar" to editing a user's comment. Comments are individual property and titles are shared, so that's like comparing painting a road sign to rewriting someone's diary. A hint that they're not "similar" is that one has been established practice for years while the other is currently provoking multiple rage threads.

When I referred to "you", I kind of meant YC. Fair point, though.

I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling. In this case, though, it's particularly important that posts about i.e. censorship get their fair shake. The title you changed it to didn't really come from anywhere (Reddit comments don't have a title) and fails to convey exactly what's going on. Stepping in to change it like that reduces the weight of the title to the point of being meaningless to lots of people - I'm sure plenty of Reddit users don't even know who spez is.

Alright, I'll buy that, though I don't agree that the story didn't get a "fair shake". It got quite a fair few wiggles and is still getting them. But the point about it being a quasi-censorship story seems reasonable, so I'll change the title back to the submitter's for now.

It would be much better if the title used language from the article itself, so if you or anyone can figure out a fair way to do that, I'd appreciate the suggestion. Obviously my attempt to do so was not universally well received.

As for "I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling", that doesn't rub me the right way at all, for two reasons. First it implies that most of our work is useless, and if that's true, we're fools, wasting our time. Alternatively, if it isn't useless, you're spending time here benefitting from all of it, in which case a line like that seems pretty smug.

Glad you changed the title back, though it's kind of a moot point now. You're right that this story is getting a fair shake now thanks to a seperate post, though.

>As for "I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling", that doesn't rub me the right way at all, for two reasons. First it implies that most of our work is useless, and if that's true, we're fools, wasting our time. Alternatively, if it isn't useless, you're spending time here benefitting from all of it, in which case a line like that seems pretty smug.

Well, I'm sure you've got your hands full keeping up with spam and trolling and such, but fwiw I have disagreed (often silently) with probably 75%ish of the moderator actions I've noticed on HN.

In my opinion, the "title change" is precisely the opposite of moderating YC-related stories less. In this case it [substantially] obfuscates the meaning of what transpired.

As a die-hard reader, and very rare commenter/submitter, it's frankly very difficult to see this as anything other than obfuscation -- especially given the context & the possible titles for a situation like this.

IMO the original title is about as spot-on as I could have come up with, and the current title is about as ambiguous as I could have come up with; how about at least changing the pronouns to have some context (ie "I" => "Reddit CEO").

That wasn't the original title. The original title is: The Admins are suffering from low energy - have resorted to editing YOUR posts. Sad!

You're objecting to the most routine of HN practices, which is to replace rewritten titles with original titles (except when the original is misleading or linkbait). In this case it doesn't fit in 80 chars and is pretty baity, so we did what we often do and took the principal sentence from the first paragraph.

Since you're a die-hard reader and therefore we love you, I'd consider suspending this most routine of HN practices just to make you happy, but first you'd have to convince me that you truly, upon reflection, think that the wording of an HN title about a Reddit shitshow is a serious trust issue. I can't bring myself to believe that any of you are really so troubled and zealous about this; it's too silly. Reddit shitshows aren't serious to begin with, and this isn't even that, it's meta Reddit ephemera.

What's the HN policy on editing titles? Is there always a note in the comments to say that the title was edited? I'm probably missing something, but it seems like the HN admins' ability to edit titles is susceptible to the same kinds of problems as the Reddit admins' ability to edit comments.

We usually post something to that effect, but not always. For one thing, not all the moderators are public. For another, posting that we made a punctuation change, or some such, is tedious.

But the important point is that on HN, titles do not belong to the submitter—they're shared—so submitters don't have any special rights over them. On the contrary, the site guidelines specifically ask them not to change an article's title unless it is misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Comments are very different, and we don't edit them without saying so, unless a user asks us to. (Though a few times I've broken down and corrected an obvious typo.)