The new title reduces the information and context about the article by several orders of magnitude, which is a tragedy given the gravity of the situation.
To all who read this comment, please upvote the OP so that it stays on the front page longer and signals "must read" with its large number of upvotes.
This heavy-handed re-titling of HN posts has got to stop. If any incident can clearly demonstrate why, this is it.
If the moderator disliked the direct appeal for aid in the original headline (I speculate, since he has not deigned to defend his editing), a proper title would be something along the lines of "Drupal developer has ALS, appeals for help". If Winborn is better known, you could go with "Drupal developer Winborn has ALS, appeals for help". If he's very widely known, you can assume most readers know who he is and go with "Aaron Winborn has ALS, appeals for help".
This conveys all the information needed for readers to evaluate the link, without being a direct emotional appeal.
I'd be happy to give the HN moderators a class in editing if they like. Editing is a learnable skill. Or, more likely, the HN moderators can continue fucking it up.
The context the original title in the blog post is totally different from here on HN hence the desirability of a different title. It's just good UX to take into consideration the different end user.
Actually, at this point I'd agree - I'd rather have immutable submitter-editorialized titles than editors butchering half the submissions.
Yep, exactly. I don't have a problem with editors fixing titles that are full of gratuitous spin or editorializing. But lately it seems that they're all but enforcing a policy of "every link must have the original page title and nothing else" and that's just silly.
Someone should try making a website like this, except use the upvotes and downvotes of its users to determine which titles and articles are worthy of being shown.
# I think the problem is less with Hacker News but more with the authors of the original articles who are unable to write a decent topic for a posting. If an author is unable to communicate his message in the headline, it might be better to use another source.
# The fixing effect is in my opinion positive. The click baiting title rises up in the top news, but get reversed to some boring, non descriptive headline. It hopefully gets people curious why this news is in the top X and click on it. This has the effect that they are conditioned to read not always the most "screaming" headlines but also stories with weaker headlines.
# As an overall effect, the top news stories don't look like a shouting match where the scariest story wins. Instead it features also stories that have boring headlines and more a content over headline oriented approach.
Of cause this whole argument is somewhat arbitrary in your case, where a real life is at stake.
The author is writing a title appropriate for the location the article is posted at. That context may be critical and is missing once the article winds up on HN.
The fixing effect is in my opinion positive.
I would say it is net positive, but that doesn't mean there aren't cases that are significantly negative.
The top news stories don't look like a shouting match where the scariest story wins.
This is a false dichotomy. We can have sane editing of titles that give us context without leaving shouting matches.
Let's say I link to the editorial of the German news magazine DER SPIEGEL. In the context of DER SPIEGEL, the title "Editorial" makes sense.
On HN "Editorial" is pretty much a useless title.
Without a title like "Aaron Winborn (Drupal developer) - Special Needs Trust donations", I read the entire original story and a few of the comments before I realised that this must be someone known in a particular programming community.