Hacker News Reader

Comment by treelovinhippie | Hacker News Reader

Nice work on censoring the original title HN mods ಠ_ಠ

You asshats completely altered the sentiment of the post. Original title had to do with Zoom CEO saying they are not encrypting calls on free plans so they can more easily work with the FBI.

Does the mod who made that change happen to own stock in Zoom?

View on HN

The original title was the title of the article, and the submitter editorialized it egregiously, breaking the site guidelines in the process. "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is an extremely well-established rule on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... There are social news sites where the submission title is a sort of mini art form, allowing submitters to frame the article in the most sensational way. HN has never been like that.

And only that part of the story would be of interest to the HN community. That was the reason I used that title.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this story slide off the front page real soon.

Edit: I see your point, because that's literally the only interesting thing about the article.

It turns out that the author of the article thinks so too, because he tweeted https://twitter.com/nicoagrant/status/1268020841054269440. Not only that, but that another user submitted that to HN an hour before you posted the Bloomberg article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23399924. It seems like the fairest solution is to merge the threads and let the other submission be the primary thread. If we had karma-sharing, we'd share the karma, but we don't yet—sorry.

Original comment below, but I'd probably have written it differently now. This was really a borderline case, where the rule in the guidelines doesn't help that much.

-----

There's a straightforward solution to this problem: you should have used the original title, as the site guidelines ask, and then posted a comment explaining what you thought was important about the article.

Titles are by far the strongest influence on threads, and being the first to submit an article on HN confers no special rights to frame the content for everybody else. Posting an initial comment is the obvious fix, because then your view is on a level playing field with everbody else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Edit: Actually, I'm sympathetic to the predicament here, because the bulk of this article is namby-pamby "Zoom is growing" stuff that isn't interesting. But a single sentence at the end of such an article isn't enough to make a good HN submission. In that case what you should have done instead was post some other article that goes in-depth into the important issue. If there's no such other article, then maybe the issue isn't that important. Or, if you're the first to notice how important it is, then you could write something about how important it is and post that instead.

Perhaps title changes that alter the sentiment should trigger a new post to be made. Because this post clearly rose to the front page on a negative sentiment. Then the title was changed to a positive sentiment while keeping all the upvote and comment stats. And now all the comments are out of context with the new title.

In such cases we sometimes post a comment explaining what the submitted title was and pointing out that some of the comments make more sense in the context of the earlier title. In this case, we don't need to do that because there's a top subthread complaining about the title change in the first place.

The full transcript might be better than this article - and offers a better headline, too.

https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/06/03/zo...

Thanks for your understanding, dang. I'll stick to the title next time (or post the tweet if it is from the same author).

The karma stuff is the last thing I care about. I just want to bring this story out to the HN community since it is something worth discussing about.

Cheers.

haha yes this title change is hilarious. best move the mods have ever made here imo. hopefully they can pointlessly detach and shift things around now and make it look like we praised zoom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com