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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Proposed bills rarely go anywhere, so we mostly treat them as off topic on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

Is there something about this case that warrants special treatment? The article seems to be from an advocacy source, which is fine, but means it has an incentive to make this sound more likely than it is. The title is an example—"Congress to" is much stronger than "amendment introduced". (Edit: submitted title was "Congress to expand Patriot Act access to browsing/search history without warrant". I've changed it.)

Edit: after reading the article, I can see that this is more than an ordinary bill proposal. But I still can't tell if it clears the bar to be on HN's front page. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172319 below.

Edit: after all this, another article ended up taking the story to the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172870. That was probably the best outcome.

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Author here, original title is: "Congress plans to expand Patriot Act with DOJ access to your web browsing and search activity without a warrant" but I'm guessing OP couldn't fit that in HN so they did some selective truncating.

This is a proposed amendment to a bill (USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act) that has the backing of the Executive Branch and majority party and the offending amendment in question was proposed by the Senate Majority Leader so while a vast majority of proposed bills do rarely go anywhere this particular instance is clear on the other end of that spectrum.

To your point about this article being from an advocacy source - I'm certainly an advocate for privacy rights and civil liberties. These articles are put out on PIA's blog (Privacy News Online) which is a Google News outlet and abides by editorial standards. I'm fortunate to be able to dedicate time to covering this type of news because there aren't many people doing so.

It’s your club but that seems like a strange policy. Being aware of proposed legislation is the first step for citizens either supporting or opposing it. It’s not helpful for deliberative democracy to only see actions after the fact once embedded in law.

That is all true, but it's a different question than what should appear on HN's front page, given that front page space is the scarcest resource this community has (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). I'm not saying that no story like this should appear—on the contrary. I'm saying that we should keep our powder dry for the ones that most belong on the front page, and for that to work, they need not to be routine.

The default forces of the internet routinely push the most sensational stories to the top, and that's not HN's purpose, so we need to make distinctions. That doesn't mean there are no exceptions, it means that exceptions need to be cases of unusual significance. Hence my question above: is there something of unusual significance in this particular development, or is this more an example of routine political wrangling? I honestly can't tell; that's why I asked.

Edit: I've read the article as well as https://www.thedailybeast.com/mitch-mcconnell-moves-to-expan... which it points to, and I still can't tell. It's pretty unusual for a story like this to sit in the grey zone instead of teetering to one side or the other, so I hope that's not a trend.

Edit 2: I've taken out a lot of general language about HN moderation that I originally included in this comment, because after reading the articles I no longer think that this is a general-moderation case. It's a weird outlier that has scrambled my pattern-matching.

Just curious dang, how would you have edited the title to satisfy HN requirements?

Here's the original:

Congress plans to expand Patriot Act with DOJ access to your web browsing and search activity without a warrant

Here's mine:

Congress to expand Patriot Act access to browsing/search history without warrant

Seeing how you would edit this title would help me write better titles in the future. I just didn't know how else to edit this given the character limitation.

“Congress” as a body has done no such thing. Some members of Congress have introduced a bill. Congress is a bicameral legislature whose members debate and vote on a variety of proposed bills, many of which are at cross purposes to each other. None of these actions are the actions of Congress as a whole until the bill passes.

That’s fair, how would you concisely convey that in an HN article title?

Edit: my only point is that it’s incredibly difficult to post articles on HN without title modification criticism. I don’t disagree with your semantic point, but how do you post that article within the HN character limit while simultaneously conveying your point?

“Bill introduced to...”

Which really gets back to dang’s point, which is basically, “so what?”. Bills get introduced all the time and most of them don’t go anywhere.

> “Bill introduced to”

That’s great, but how do you fit that into the original title? I encourage you to try it as an exercise, that title was incredibly hard to fit within HN’s requirements. Your suggestion adds over a dozen characters over “Congress”. Seriously, it’s not easy to edit these titles sometimes.

> “so what?”

Well, if a bill isn’t worth discussing until after it becomes law, then how do bills like SOPA or any other recent and unpopular bills get stopped? If you don’t talk about it beforehand, how is discussing the bill after passage more effective?

Ok, I worked through this example and watched what I did, and my process macroexpands to the following:

> Congress plans to

This is misleading so we need to take it out (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

> expand Patriot Act with DOJ access to your web browsing and search activity without a warrant

This sounds accurate once it's clear that it's a proposed amendment, but needs shortening. How could we shorten it? Well, "without a warrant" can turn into "warrantless". "DOJ" can probably be dropped, since whether it's DOJ or some other government branch isn't of top-level importance. And "you" or "your" can almost always be dropped from titles; that's a linkbait trope anyhow (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Applying those edits I get:

> expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web browsing and search activity

That's shorter but not short enough because we need to get the amendment bit in there. At this point I'd probably compress "web browsing and search activity" into a short phrase that covers both. "Web history" comes to mind. Edit: on second thought, we can just keep the title's original word, "activity"—it's always best not to introduce new words if the existing ones will do:

> expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web activity

Now we have 22 chars before the 80 limit. We can do this:

> Amendment to expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web activity

Can we do this?

> Proposed amendment to expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web activity

Yes we can! 80 chars on the nose. So I'd probably go with that and then wait for users to tell me how I got it wrong.

Edit: changed the title. Submitted title was "Congress to expand Patriot Act access to browsing/search history without warrant".

> Proposed bills rarely go anywhere, so we mostly treat them as off topic on HN

By that logic, wouldn’t reporting on SOPA have been off-topic until it had become law? That bill was killed due to activism on the part of some big tech players, but that’s not on-topic because it wasn’t yet a law?

That's why I asked whether there's something about this case that warrants special treatment. Obviously there need to be exceptions.

It involves warrantless capture of browser and search activity of US citizens, legislation that directly impacts a topic that is discussed every single day on this forum: online privacy.

This bill is up for a full Senate Vote, it's not like it's just one Senator talking out of turn. 37 Democrats and Republicans voted the warrant requirement down, a detail you will find in the article. Destruction of privacy is a remarkably bipartisan issue that has already seen some major votes.

What else do you need to make this any more relevant to the community than it already is?

Edit: wrong number

I'm frankly afraid to answer this because it starts to feel like a political cross-examination. What usually happens in those is I answer from the tiny domain of HN moderation that it is my job to inhabit, and the result is accusations of political bias, as if I'm secretly in favor of everyone's web activity being spied on, or worse.

I get the apprehension to try it yourself, even HN is a difficult forum for some conversations. I respect your decision to not try to edit the title yourself. But do you see how frustrating it is to be called out for my editorializing, which is essentially a UX limitation of the forum? Asking for explicit guidance from a moderator gets me pretty much nothing. You’re telling me I’m wrong, but you won’t really tell me in any explicit way how to do better, which I believe is a moderator’s responsibility. I don’t know how to do better other than to communicate is as clear terms as I can that I don’t know what to do.

I’ve made a case for why this story is relevant, and I feel it’s pretty strong. If legislation that’s facing a full senate vote around online privacy isn’t in the interest of a forum built by hackers, then I’ll take my ball and go home. I just haven’t heard a good reason why this shouldn’t be on-topic yet.

On the title, I think we've had some crossed signals. I explained in detail how I would have gone about editing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172812. I've gone ahead and changed the title now.

That's just a surface problem though. The root problem was perhaps this particular article was so much on the advocacy side that it became hard to tell to what degree this was a high-signal story for HN. Maybe this sounds weird to you, but if you saw the myriads of such articles that get posted here, you'd probably have the same issue—either that or you'd be fine with HN turning into an advocacy site. It's in the interests of such sites to have as many such articles as possible, and to make them as dramatic as possible. That's fine, it's their job, but it's HN's job to try to filter those for the unusually significant ones, as I've been trying unsuccessfully to explain.

In the time that we've been having this discussion, another article made the front page on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172870.

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