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Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

What was wrong with the better original title "The Chinese paddlefish, one of world's largest fish, has gone extinct"

Perhaps because that title completely omits any form of attribution, which as the article suggests, is largely because of the Gezhouba Dam which completely cut paddlefish off from their only spawning grounds.

Why would you want to omit that part?

That said, this title is a poor attempt at communication.

Well now you have a title that's, to me, incomprehensible

It's not just you - the new title makes no sense at all to me either. It reads as a jumbled collection of random words :/

"The paddlefish has been dammed to extinction"

You’re hired

There's nothing wrong with:

  The Chinese paddlefish, one of world's largest fish, has gone extinct *because of Yangtze dam*

The problem is this part:

  Paddlefish, largest, from spawn, now extinct

HN’s hyperbole filter definitely takes out “world’s” on the first pass, but you can put it back.

Example: I touched off a bit of a “seems bait-y” pas de deux/do-si-do with the bot/mods re a BBC headline a while back. It’s towards the bottom (where it surely belongs) of this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26552375

Grammar, largest, from original, now incomprehensible

I'm sorry, this shit cracks me up so much. I'm glad that everyone got so much out of the title!

I thought the guide was to use the original title

> Perhaps because that title completely omits any form of attribution

Though even there, it's... not great, as most people will probably read Yangtze dam as the Three Gorges Dam.

98% of the time someone changes the title of the article to which they are linking they make it worse.

Cooks, many, title

Nothing; that's what the title should be. The guidelines ask you to use the original title, and not try to summarize the article yourself in the submission title.

HN has guidelines, not rules, and there are times when they can be bent.

For titles, finding (or manufacturing) one that's clearer based on actual article text is a common alternative. I've suggested "Chinese paddlefish has gone extinct due to overfishing and dams" to the moderators. (Much of that phrase occurs within the article.)

I don't think we disagree. The important point is that it's not the job (or the privilege) of the submitter to determine for everyone else what the most important angle on the story is. Titles are community property. That's exactly what went wrong here.

Agreed to that point.

Has anyone ever considered that maybe the HN guidelines are wrong here?

In great detail, over the better part of a decade, yes. You can find some of the rationale here and a few more searches will dig up more discussions about it than even an olympic-level messageboard-hardened person could possibly bear

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

the HN guidelines often lead to some stupid titles, but i think this is one of those times that show why the guidelines are good. The original headline accurately represents the content of the article. the edited version is an incomprehensible mess.

My guess is that the title that the submitter originally suggested (with dam info that is not in the original title) was over the 80-character limit for HN titles, so they shortened it to the current existing (and confusing) title.

For reference when it inevitably gets changed, it’s currently “Yangtze dam separates Paddlefish, largest, from spawn, now extinct”.

Original title is:

The Chinese paddlefish, one of world's largest fish, has gone extinct

Subtitle is:

Native to China’s Yangtze River, these fish grew 23 feet in length, but haven’t been spotted since 2003.

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