Hacker News Reader

Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

I think the opposite would be better: get startups to rip the bandaid off and title their posts: “We’re shutting down.”

Then you don’t have to waste your energy reading corporate waffle.

Well, in an ideal world, _everyone_ would be using informative headlines, regardless of whether they are shutting things down or not.

For this post in particular, "An Early Look at Fresh 2" would make a better title, albeit with less "clickbait potential" (well, people love drama). With a "An Update on X" headline you both fail to inform and give the impression that you are killing the thing.

That would be a way better outcome, but there's also not much we can do to prevent that.

Why is it harder to ask people who are shutting down to be explicit in their headlines? rather than telling all the people who aren’t shutting down to change their headlines?

You aren't from around here, are you? /s

Disruptors gonna disrupt even when broke AF and shutting down.

Asking is easy, but they don't have a big incentive to make it clear up front that they're shutting down. Whereas the people who aren't shutting down do have a clear incentive to make sure that people don't think they're shutting down.

Unfortunately, history is littered with linguistic treadmills for concepts people don’t like to say. We destroyed our singular “you” like this, I don’t think we’re going to stop to save “an update on {thing}”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com