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Comment by progbits | Hacker News Reader

This is the stupidest HN feature. It does very little for clickbait (flagging and voting is better), and routinely screws up titles to the point it drastically changes or reverses their meaning.

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When you submit it’s worth checking how much HN chewed up the title. I often face the need to fix it myself.

Yep it's a complete anti-feature and I have no idea why it's still in use.

Any feature is a "complete anti-feature" if you only count the things it gets wrong! The ones it gets right don't get noticed or commented on. It does more good than bad, so keeping it is an easy call.

It's true that the ones it gets wrong stand out like sore thumbs. Then again, it's probably good for the community to have something innocuous to hate.

Because you can edit the title after the fact?

If - to paraphrase the other folks before me - it causes more annoyance than it does good, then the fact that one can spend more effort undoing its damage after the fact is, in fact, a bug rather than a feature.

But you're only hearing from the people who are annoyed enough to write a comment complaining about it. Many other users (such as myself) may be +1 or +0 on the functionality, in which case you can't conclude that "it causes more annoyance than it does good". You'd need to know user's preferences (if you're solving for that) or the value HN admin attributes to the feature vs. the value they attribute to the cost imposed on users (if you're solving for that)

Fair enough.

Eh, it's fine. It does help for many things, and if you don't like the choice it's made, you can edit it and it won't butcher it again.

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