Ask HN: Why do article titles arbitrarily change?

4 points·emingo··6 comments

And who does the changing? I've noticed several articles titles changing throughout the day. I also remember that one story I posted had the title changed. Just wondering!

View on HN

I believe it's HN mods who change titles that don't comply to the guidelines (e.g. misleading title) usually they just change the title to the title of the article.

I wonder why the script doesn't just try to parse the metadata (and maybe H1) from the submitted site? That would impartially cover most cases, I think.

If a title is misleading or linkbait, we're meant to adjust it on submission. It'd be a good idea if the rule were just that you must use original titles, but it's a bit more nuanced and does seem to need some human oversight.

Fair enough.

The Hacker News welcome message

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One of the guidelines is to prefer submitting original article titles:

"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

. . . .

"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

The Hacker News FAQ

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

hm I read that thing when I joined, but I guess memory is a funny thing!

Thanks for the answer :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com