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Comment by NickNaraghi | Hacker News Reader

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NickNaraghi

The title of these threads needs work!

Possible to group by theme or something?

Or just leave out the specifics. The 2-word pitch is cutting too much to be any sort of useful.

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It's true that the generic nouns don't say much, but the company names would say even less.

Since examples are the best way to learn, I would be interested if anyone could come up with a better title for this thread. It's not obvious how to do this!

As a start, matching the individual thread name format would be great, e.g: Launch YC (S21): 3D Web; Training... :-)

If I understand your suggestion correctly, that would consume an extra 6 characters in the title, which is 8% of the 80-char limit. That would make it much harder to give each startup a place in the title, and I don't like the idea of leaving any of them out.

Personally, I click on the launch threads because they're part of the current batch: a clear indication that they're part of the current batch (rather than just a generic "launch HN" announcement) is much more valuable to me than the reference to the type of business. The "Launch HN" title is used by non-YC people, meaning these threads come across as non-YC threads than YC threads.

I think on balance you're probably right that excluding a startup from the title is a problem though -- so yeah, in hindsight, I think you made the right choice.

I changed it to say "Launch YC" instead of "Launch HN" this time round, for reasons related to what you're saying. Doesn't seem to have landed though :)

Another thought I had was "Meet S21". Better? It would free up a char! "Meet YC S21" is too long.

"YC S21" would be the shortest. That is, something like "YC S21: Foo, Bar, Baz" with a word or phrase for each startup. But I'm not sure if that would convey that it's a launch thread.

Another possibility: "YC Launch" instead of "Launch YC".

Our original idea was "Meet the Batch" but that's way too long.

How about "YC S21 Launch"?

That's too long as a prefix to be followed by the startups, and too generic as a title on its own.

"Meet S21" would be completely meaningless to me without context. It's not a shorthand I associate with anything. What about YC21?

Another user posted a comment suggesting something like

  Launch YC S21 - Batch thread #3

Would that be clear enough? We may end up with something like that.

>which is 8% of the 80-char limit.

What a strange problem to have. Why not just increase the limit? Why can't you have a special title with a higher limit?

Because it's a major part of the look-and-feel of the site and we don't change that without a good reason. Actually, we pretty much don't change that ever.

Respectfully, I'd challenge you on that and say you have good reason.

>Actually, we pretty much don't change that ever.

A classic mistake.

I would say the classic mistake is arbitrary redesign. Users hate change. Not inflicting random change on them is one of our secret weapons. Not saying we'd never do it, but there's a hierarchy of problem importance, and "need to have meaningful YC launch titles" is multiple levels below "don't inflict arbitrary change on users".

Thanks for doing the hard work of experimenting here!

How about mirroring the Who’s hiring format?

>Launch YC: S21 (August 3)

I'd like each startup to be represented somehow in the title. If possible.

I really don’t think the one/two words are representing the companies in any meaningful way personally.

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