Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The submitted title ("SolarWinds use the password 'solarwinds123' on their Update Servers") broke the site guidelines badly. Not only is it not the article title (which the site guidelines ask people to use except when it's misleading or baity), it's not even what the article actually says about that cherry-picked detail.

Titles are by far the biggest influence on threads. As a result of this title, this thread is a shallow, frothy rantfest.

The site guidelines say "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Cherry-picking a detail is editorializing, getting it wrong is misleading, and getting it wrong by making it more sensational is linkbait, for the trifecta.

Submitters: please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, please do so in the comments. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

>which the site guidelines ask people to use except when it's misleading or baity

Or too long and needs shortening. In these cases, what, if there is one, is the preferred way to shorten titles? Truncate or attempt to rewrite to shorten without editorializing?

Good question! (The limit is 80 chars.) The answer is to truncate, not rewrite. However, truncation isn't always natural. One shouldn't start abbreviating words, for example, that don't normally get abbreviated.

In cases where there isn't a natural way to truncate, a better option is to look at the HTML doc title, a subtitle, a heading, or sometimes even a photo caption, that say accurately and neutrally what the article is about. There's often also a sentence in the opening paragraph that can be used. Sometimes none of those exists, but you can find a representative phrase lurking in the article body. The key is that it be representative though, not cherry-picked. There's a bit of interpretation involved there, but you can nearly always pick out the general-overview phrase if one exists. They have a distinctive quality.

Rewriting should only be a last resort. When we edit titles, we always try to use representative language from the article and rather than to make up language ourselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com