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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

At this point I think we might be going a bit overboard with title changes.

Now that it's just "MongoDB 4.2.6", the title makes me think that this is a release announcement, not an analysis of the software.

The first title (that specifically referenced a finding of the analysis) was best, imo. Mildly opinionated or whatever, but at least it quickly communicated the gist of the post. On the other hand:

"Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6" – not super helpful if you're not already familiar with the Jepsen body of work.

"MongoDB 4.2.6" – as stated above, sounds like a release announcement.

If you want a suggestion, maybe something like "Jepsen evaluation of MongoDB 4.2.6"? Not overly specific (/ negative) like the first title, but at least provides some slight amount of context.

@dang

View on HN

Please read the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They say: "If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link." That's why a moderator changed it: the submitted title was "Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6".

I don't mind making an exception, since exceptions are things sometimes. Jepsen is famous on HN, so the current title is not an issue. Indeed, referencing a specific finding would arguably be misleading, since this article is the Jepsen report about MongoDB 4.2.6. Btw, I don't know what you mean by "The first title (that specifically referenced a finding of the analysis) was best". The submitted title was "Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6" and it has only ever rotated between two states, one with "Jepsen: " and one without. Are you confusing this thread with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285249?

It's very silly to have this be the top comment on the page (I've since downweighted it, but that's where it was when I looked in). Yesterday I briefly swapped the URL of this article into the other thread, but then reversed that because it seemed that thread couldn't support a more technical discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23288120). I invited aphyr to repost it instead, which was quite a break from our standard practice of downweighting follow-up posts, but seemed like the best solution at the time. What technical discussion was our reward? Bickering about title policy!

This... usually happens on Jepsen HN threads. The full title, as in the page metadata, and as originally submitted, is "Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6. At some point a mod drops the "Jepsen:" part, then we have this discussion, and it comes back. :)

"Why don't you put Jepsen:" on the same line as the database name and version?"

Space concerns, and also, it's immediately above the DB name in giant letters.

"Why don't you give them more creative names?"

Clients love to argue about the titles of these analyses; having a concise, predictable policy for titling is how I get past those discussions.

As another commenter pointed out, it might be worth making the titles "An evaluation of X" going forward – better for HN and probably better everywhere else this is shared too.

Not sure how many ways I can say this: the titles are already "Jepsen: X". HN's got a policy in place that means sometimes mods change the title to just "X". That's not something I have control over, sorry.

Right, but "Jepsen: X" doesn't really mean anything to anyone that isn't familiar with your work. "An Evaluation of X" is much more informative.

I've invested seven years of my life into this brand, and my choices are carefully considered.

"An evaluation of MongoDB 4.2.6" might be neutral and informative enough I suppose.

But then again ultimately the blame is on the author of the article, it's a terrible title for this type of articles. I can understand if the moderators here don't want to go through the trouble of dealing with editorialized titles (with all the controversies it could generate) when clearly the original author didn't care enough to come up with a decent title.

Why? His site is about evaluating distributed data stores. In context of his site, that title makes perfect sense, HN should just add the missing context to its title.

Because as can be seen from the fact that most people only found this article because it was posted on HN (and not because they were browsing the site), the context of the overall site isn't super relevant.

Site context isn't a given when most of us are finding content via 3rd party sources.

It's the article's title...

A generic “Mongo 4.2.6” title doesn’t help me decide whether to click on the link (especially with how light the domain is). I thought it was a release announcement and only clicked through to the comments because of yesterday’s discusssion.

An HN title needs to be read along with the site name to the right of it.

The styling of the site name makes it hard to scan. If it’s so essential, the font should be darker and bigger.

That's a fair point, but people have a lot of contradictory preferences about things like that. I think I'd rather address this by allowing more customization of the site. Still thinking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199264.

As I said there, I’d like to see that added

Ah so you did! I missed that.

And taken out of context it makes little sense.

Well... it's the articles second H1 header. The title is "Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6".

No context doesn't help.

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