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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Also, the original title of this thread was about a thousand times more informative.

In case anyone is curious, the title was "" Gnome 3.7 removes terminal transparency; closing bug with simply "No." ""

Yes. This title changing business is infuriating.

I agree. Changing titles decreases the quality of the submission since they are almost always uninformative and mundane compared to the originally submitted titles. And this thread is case in point.

Edit: I'm tempted to write a bot that will catch title changes and post the original title as a comment in the thread automatically.

I tried something like that once. HNers were not fans of novilty accounts, even a useful one that added content like yours would.

Though, I'd be in favor of you trying and seeing the result. My test was limited and short lived so it may not be indicative of the full community.

The bot which automatically posted links to previous submissions of the same URL was also received pretty poorly despite often being useful, so I wouldn't have high hopes.

You'll probably be shadow-banned; there's another dirty little HN secret. The moderation here is pretty horrifyingly bad.

I keep coming back to this idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5653878) of creating an API that stores the original titles and then just unleashing a GreaseMonkey scripts that compensates for editors that forget <h1> != story.

It makes sense to keep the titles of the original articles. Otherwise you would be open for complete rewording of the title, and passing of comments by poster. Let the content linked to speak for itself.

As for how this happens, I don't know? Is this a from moderators import title_checking ... But then Arc is more functional so maybe it is done in code?

It's probably a social experiment.

I recently found out that the guidelines explicitly say, "[barring exceptions] please use the original title". (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I'm still sympathetic to the title-change complaints, and I think HN is leaving a source of creativity on the table to the community's detriment. But the guidelines are theirs to setup and enforce.

I assume that one of the motivations for this guideline is to prevent submitters from editorializing their submissions by altering the original titles (e.g. "Idiotic developers close perfectly reasonable bug report").

Yeah, I always thought the guidelines said, "Don't editorialize."

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