Why was the HN story about changing titles killed? | Hacker News Reader

Why was the HN story about changing titles killed?

18 pointsmixmax10 comments

Just now a submission about moderators of the site changing titles of the submission was killed. It had more than 400 votes, and had some good points, good examples, and good discussion.

Why was this killed? It seemed like a good post with a sober discussion of when and how the editors should change titles of submissions.

Original (now dead) post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102013

View on HN

I would guess that people aren't aware that it doesn't require moderators to kill an item. There are plenty of people on HN who don't want to see meta, or meta-on-meta, and who will happily flag meta items.

Enough flags, and it's dead.

Other submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102977

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102907

But of course we don't know and mods presumably also have access to this function without a story needing flags.

Kinda ironic that a post about heavy handed moderating gets censored.

I am sorry, but as ColinWright has already indicated, we don't know that it was "censored". Since you admit we don't know, I wish you wouldn't use such a loaded, accusatory word.

Sorry, for 'that' please read 'if'.

I'm not a moderator, but I think the problem with such threads is that they are too easy. They are too self-referential. Bad title edits happen. I'm sure even bad article killing happens. It is also true that there is no good feedback mechanism for bad title edits. Life isn't perfect, and sometimes you really have to consider the cost/benefit of petty injustices like this.

If it becomes systematic abuse, rather than occasional mistakes, then yes, make a stink. But so far the damage is pretty limited, and HN seems to be working pretty well.

It does sort of point out the need for those who value HN to have some redundancy in their social networking.

>But so far the damage is pretty limited, and HN seems to be working pretty well. //

The thread seemed pretty contradictory to your conclusion.

I think the message from the secret society of HN moderators is "butt out this is our board not yours".

Quashing feedback in this way is pretty awful particularly in view of the legal issues involved.

What legal issues do you mean?

This is ridiculous. It had 472 upvotes. Moderators, please do not respond to criticism this way.

Please change title to: "Why was the story about the story about changing titles killed."

They obviously don't care. The last two which made it to the front page were also killed.

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