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Comment by emil-lp | Hacker News Reader

The title is actually

    The A in AGI stands for Ads

Not

    Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

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This is standard HN moderation. The title was linkbait, so we changed it.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". Note the unless.

When we do this, we try to find a representative phrase from the article itself that accurately and neutrally represents what the article is about. There is nearly always one of those if you look for it. In this way, we (mostly) avoid having to make up wording of our own, which is something we don't like to do.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

What’s the definition of linkbait in this case? I can’t find a good definition online, as the best I can find is “content designed to attract backlinks”, which this does not appear to be / isn’t related to the title?

I'm not a definitions person but surely it means something like grabbing attention with sensationalism (drama / snark / anger / etc.)

Thank you for your service, dang. You do a great job keeping HN a great site. I disagree with your decision regarding changing the title, though. Yes, it's tongue-in-cheek, but I wouldn't call it bait.

I wonder how HN anno 1968 would have moderated "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". *

* Amusing side note: Dijkstra's submitted title was actually "A Case Against the Goto Statement" but the editor editorialized it.

As I read or rather hear it, "The A in AGI stands for Ads" has two things qualifying it as linkbait in the HN sense. One is snark, the other is the mammoth meme ("AGI"). Both those things stick to the Big Ball of Mud that rolls chaotically over most of the internet.

The objection here isn't to wit, it's to predictability. I'm not sure what the equivalent of internet snark was in 1968, but I doubt that "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" embodied it.

Of course, interpretations differ. No two people would agree on all these classifications, including me and tomhow. The important point isn't that we always make the correct call (we don't, plus there's no such thing as the correct call), but that we try to the principles from the guidelines, even though doing so involves interpretation and is therefore uneven.

On the bright side, it means that objections to titles and/or title edits, always good for firing up an HN thread, will always be with us!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8770124 (Dec 2014)

It was this title before, so it was intentionally changed; I wonder why.

I’m the author but not the poster. I didn’t change the title. Maybe the mods did?

The title came to me as an epiphany too haha, shame to see it get changed.

Because the title of the post should match the title of the submission - unless the mods dislike it, then it'll be changed to something else.

The mods dislike many titles but only change some of them. We also like some of the ones we change!

That's because there's a principle involved. It's not hard to find: see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671377 nearby.

My guess as to why it was changed was that it doesn't really work as a pithy quip the moment you actually think about it.

OpenAI is introducing ads on their purported path from "AI" to "AGI"... hence the "A" was already accounted for in the acronym. If only "Ads" started with "G"!

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