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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

What was wrong with the original title? It was "What's been wrought using the Piece Table?"

I would hazard a guess that others, like myself, would have simply passed this article by, not knowing what a piece table was.

I know now, which I hope is the important part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_table

We've changed the title back to that. It was "The Algorithm that enabled unlimited undo and fast save/copy-paste in Word" before.

One secret of HN titles is that sometimes the non-original title helps a story make the front page but then reverting it to the original makes it more interesting again.

I had no idea what a Piece Table was and how important it is, so I wanted it also to be reflected in the title.

It seems a bit click-baity ("well, what has been wrought using it?"). I suppose that the current one is arguably still a bit so (it could be "How the piece table enabled unlimited undo …"), but it seems better to me.

Hmmm... my guess is you're probably not making a whole lot off those ads on your website if "What's been wrought using the Piece Table?" strikes you as click baity.

They're referring to the format of "click to find out!" when it can be mentioned right there in the title.

That nobody is going "oh boy, so what has been wrought using the piece table?" is part of their point.

Click to find out without the normal read the whole article to find out? You are given a new title when you enter the site. Those two combined give you more then enough information to figure out if you already know it. And if you already knew that Word is using the algorithm, you would probably just skipped or opened the link to verify that is was this algorithm. All this combined, do you mean I should have kept the original title?

The old one conveys much less information than the new, all things considered

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