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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

Dear moderator, why did you change the title? I worked hard to abbreviate it to 80 characters without changing the wording or editorializing. And it's not the fact that I found interesting, it was the picture. Thanks.

For the record I had GOOG Self-Driving Car gathers almost 1 GB/sec.What it "sees" making L turn [pic]

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I can't believe that you were willing to abbr. "Google" with "GOOG" but had to use "almost" in this sentence (utterly redundant word here) or "1 GB/sec" instead of "1 GB/s"

Sorry, i don't know how much "effort" you put into your abbreviation but your title looks like a dirty hack, i would never want on the front page.

Google Car gathers 1GB/sec. What it "sees" making Left turn

That would have been better in my opinion.

With all due respect, i think the Mod changing the title is justified in this case.

I don't think you can leave out the self-driving car. 'Google Car' is ambiguous and could mean either the Google Streetview cars or their self-driving cars.

If you think so:

-) Google Self-Driving Car gathers 1GB/s. Picture of it analyzing left turn

-) Google Self-Driving Car gathers 1GB/s. What it "sees" making Left Turn

My critic is not so much with the title op chose, more so that he/she felt the need to make the case that a Mod shouldn't have changed it.

Op wanted to know why it is Mod did it, i answered.

The word almost was not kept for accuracy's sake (could have said ~1GB/sec), but for the word's storytelling quality. Imagine if we had said the car "collects barely 1 GB/sec." Without "almost," it becomes more difficult, however so slightly, to grasp that 1 GB/sec is an impressive amount of data.

~1GB/s

I really dislike the mods here changing titles to bend to personal views. I've had a few submissions that gained good traction and got heavy upvotes until a mod changed the title to something meaningless and unrelated.

They seem to mostly change the titles to what the title of the actual article was. This is of course a terrible policy when the blog in question [edit: does not] use descriptive titles, or titles that only make sense if you are coming from the perspective of already being on the blog.

A good example would be the post I made about a third party audit of CloudFlare's security and how they failed to block any of the most basic widely known attacks. The mods change to the academic title of the PDF paper failed to provide any sort of enlightenment about why it was interesting at all to HN readers.

Some stories would drop off the front page fast if the original title was used initially. By the time the moderator changes it, usually there is enough weight that people read them because of the # of upvotes.

A lot of the titles are terrible. Like a single word or phrase that means absolutely nothing without context. I hope the mods are not doing that.

It doesn't seem to have changed the meaning much. If anything, I think it's a bit easier to read at a quick glance. I like to scan titles or I'd never get past the first few pages on HN.

GOOG Self-Driving Car gathers almost 1 GB/sec.What it "sees" making L turn

vs.

Google's self-driving car gathers almost 1 GB/sec

Reading the edited title, I wasn’t going to click through to Twitter. I figured it was just a one line tweet that wouldn’t explain much.

After reading hammock’s comment, I clicked the link to see the picture. The ‘[pic]’ suffix to the title was informative, no need to remove it.

I would have never clicked the link to the twitter post if not for the callout to the "image".

Titles do change our behavior by proving us with clues with why we should be interested.

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