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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

It places priority on not-clickbait, above most things. You could have a title that isn't super descriptive, asks a question, maintains an air of mystery, whatever. But a title that deliberately elevates some near-irrelevant detail for attention is purposefully deceptive and, well, less than good (by HN's rules, that is).

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Eh, sure - but you are arguing for non-clickbait titles, while I was replying to the OP who complained about not revealing more about the conclusion in the title. It seems we agree there that some mystery is allowed: the point of contention is on "click-baitiness".

I don't have a similar principled defense of clickbait titles, either in general or mine specifically! I just thought it was a funny one and didn't expend more effort on coming up with a non-clickait one.

That's an independent issue from revealing more info in the title.

Oh, I don't really have any argument about what titles you should put on your own writing. It's your writing, if you feel its narrative purpose is served by an intricate web of title feints, line noise, whatnot, more power to you.

I'm just explaining the HN title rules, you can see them here (do a find title):

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's nothing in there about titles having to be 'information-full'. Lots of perfectly HN-good titles aren't.

Got it, I didn't understand you were talking about HN titles, rather than the blog post title.

I didn't submit it to HN so I can't comment on the title choice, other than say it at least reflects the literal title of the page which I guess would be the default when submitting.

I tend to outsource my comments to HN, since my blog is a github pages static site and introducing comments without tracking and ads is a pain, but I definitely don't choose my post titles to satisfy HN rules.

Right, technically, fixing the title in this case would have been on the poster. Then there'd probably be a long subthread about why the title was changed so drastically. Title-lawyering is a professional metasport around here, as has been amply demonstrated.

Grabs popcorn :).

Pretty much the HN version of nerd sniping.

https://xkcd.com/356/

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