Comment by daodedickinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daodedickinson | Hacker News Reader

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>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).

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?

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.

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