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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

This submission broke HN's rules by editorializing the title. Doing that eventually causes your account to lose submission privileges on HN, so please don't do that.

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

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

Cherry-picking a detail from an article and making that the title is editorializing—in fact it's the leading form of editorializing. Titles are by far the biggest influence on threads, so this is a big deal. On HN, being the first to submit an article doesn't confer any special rights to frame it for everybody else.

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, please do so in a comment. Then your view is on a level playing field with everyone else's. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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To be honest, I wouldn't have opened the topic if the original title (Denmark Extends Business Aid to Increase Spending By $15 Billion) was used as this was somewhat uninteresting overall, "that companies which pay out dividends, buy back own shares or are registered in tax havens won’t be eligible for any of the aid programs" was the more interesting piece of information I might have otherwise skipped.

The answer to this is that the baitier title can help bootstrap an article onto the front page and that's not always bad. Once it's on the front page, that's enough of an indication that there might be something interesting about the article, so it's not going to damage it as much to restore the title. I tend not to include this point in top-level public comments because subtleties like this make the explanation too complicated.

I say "not always bad" but in the present case I do think it was bad, because there really isn't much of interest in the article. Even though the cherry-picked point was the more interesting detail, it only got a single sentence. That's not enough to support a non-generic discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

Probably a stupid question, but what does the rule mean by "title"?

Consider this story: https://www.vox.com/2018/9/4/17486110/metabolism-diet-fast-w...

The HTML <title> is "Metabolism and weight loss: debunking myths in the metabolic chamber - Vox".

The big bold <h1> text at the start of the article is "What I learned about weight loss from spending a day inside a metabolic chamber".

Is one of those preferred, or is either acceptable?

That's not a stupid question, it's an excellent and subtle point. In your example, one of those two is much less baity than the other, so that one is preferred.

What the rule means by "original title" can be any one of the candidate titles that an article itself provides. That can be the main heading on the page, but often that is misleading or baity, especially with media sites. The HTML doc title, as you point out, is often a good alternative [1]. Often a subtitle is better than the main title. Other good candidates can be the URL, a photo caption, or a phrase from the opening paragraph.

When the original title is misleading or linkbait, HN's rule says to change it. In such cases it's far better to replace it with representative language from the article itself [2] than to make up one's own language for it. On HN the principle is to let the content speak for itself, so we try wherever possible to avoid putting words in an article's mouth. When undoing the dirty work of a headline writer [3], put the author back in charge. Don't knock headline person off their perch in order to grab it yourself.

When the obvious options for a good title all fail, you can nearly always find one in the text itself. In fact, it's strikingly rare for media articles not to include, somewhere on the page, an accurate and neutral phrase that says what the article is actually about. I wonder if this is not coincidence, or good writing, so much as SEO. In other words, the very same forces that make headline writers churn out bait to entice users may be driving authors or editors to include accurate summaries to bait search engines. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to hunt for the latter to replace the former.

In cases where none of the options for a title produces a good one, including scouring the article body, it's ok to make up a title as a last resort—again, using representative words from the article itself as much as possible.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

What if the cherry picked detail is the interesting detail worth discussing on hn?

Yes, this was my reasoning. The most interesting thing of the article was the explanation why some companies wouldn't be eligible for aid - the fact that Denmark offers more aid isn't interesting, countries do that all the time now. However, excluding companies which use tax havens or pay out dividends is new.

Besides, editorializing is expressing an opinion, which is not something this title is doing - or am I seeing this wrong?

The official answer is: then it will make a particularly interesting comment to add to the thread.

The unofficial messy answer is: sometimes, let's say 10% of the time, there are exceptions.

Ex post facto. We can't know that until after the discussion has happened--ergo, avoiding editorialization allows community interest to happen more naturally.

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