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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

I generally try not to start meta discussions here, but this HN submission is an example of a trend I'm seeing more of here lately. The title used to give context without editorializing, until an administrator changed it to the cryptic 9to5, which matches the title of the blog post but conveys no information about the article unless you were already following the story.

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Yeah I thought I was clicking on it to read about some sort of lifehacker style discussion regarding not working normal hours. I don't understand this policy.

This is exactly what I thought too.

When I submitted the article, I left the title exactly like it is at the source. While I do try to follow the HN submission guidelines, I did wonder if the title would be insufficient to readers. My quick thought process concluded when I felt that HN readers would be sufficiently guided by seeing the instapaper.com domain. That's not to say I assumed reader familiarity with the recent 9to5-Arment issues, just that the Instapaper name would tell readers it had something to do with the app/service rather than a topic Marco Arment was writing on his personal blog (marco.org).

I thought that was a reasonable approach. Not perfect, but ample for what I assume is a thoughtful readership here.

Oh, sorry for making this an example then. I was sure I'd seen it with a more contextual headline earlier, and assumed it was changed by moderators, but I must have misremembered.

Thank you, but I don't think you owe me an apology. You brought up an issue that, relevant or not to this submission, I thought I would address as far as it applied to this thread.

The RSS feed doesn't show the domain next to the headlines, so if I don't click through to the comments, the cryptic headline is even worse.

The null hypothesis around here seems to be that HN mods are changing titles because they are title nazis. Instead what might be happening is the algorithim is retitling the posts. Example: if 10 people submit the same link, only the first one creates a post and the others upvote that post. But what if the other 8 still count as title votes: say 8 of them use the same title, then the title in the first story auto-updates to use the common one (which of course is the actual post title). The net result and the whole point of all this would be to strip out anything added which includes both positive context and negative bias/editorializing.

Hanlon's razor, modified:

Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by algorithms.

It seems like admins are "fixing" the titles of every blog post on the front page submitted with a bit of context in the title. This is the kind of thing that is not necessarily a terrible idea, but should be discussed openly rather than silently implemented.

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