It's worse than that. Since you can't editorialize titles and some authors like to give their articles poetic, meaningless names like "A butterfly in the sky," when the actual article talks about a security exploit in Bitcoin, coded in Go and released by Wikileaks.
I often find myself ignoring interesting articles on HN only to go read them later on reddit with a much more descriptive, editorialized headline.
Right now there's a good example of this problem on the front page. The article about the Android/PRNG security flaw is aptly editorialized as "Google confirms Java and OpenSSL crypto PRNG on Android are broken," but the original article is titled "Some SecureRandom Thoughts," which is meaningless and I would never have clicked it under any circumstances. Thankfully the mods left this one alone.
The point of titles should be to give an informing mini-summary about the topic.
Let me know if you submit to YC, I might join!
It would be nice if every title accurately described what it was about so I could make better decisions about what to read now, what to read later, and what to pass over.
Thank you.
I revised the title for that link several times. My final edit lifted the style of the Ars Technica[1] headline, but specifically added the more technical "Java and OpenSSL crypto PRNG" that I worried would be incomprehensible to the layman...
Though, the mods did remove my trailing "." from text. ;-)
> You know, with a link title like that, I was really hoping to see a food processor powered by a steam engine.
>> That's HN for you. You're never quite sure whether it's programming related or not.
>> Same. I was expecting something along the lines of the pulse jet powered tea kettle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fDM9Eb16Do
Then my eyes settled on the word "Blender," and my interest grew stronger as I thought about 3D modeling.
Then my brain ingested the complete phrase, "Steam-powered Blender," I figured it was steam-punk related, and I moved on, slightly disappointed.
Awful title.
I get that HN doesn't want editorialized submission titles (e.g. /r/politics), but if a title is too vague to warrant attention, what's the harm in submitting it to HN in a manner that gives it context?
[1]http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/the-moment-of-truth-for-air...
[2]http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travele...
It might be feasible to test this by changing titles a lot. A mean person could build titles ("AAA AAA") to discover the algo.
Whatever. Bit of a tangent.
15.[dead] Oracle's Larry Ellison enthusiastically applauds NSA spying (techeye.net) 1 point by Mitt 17 minutes ago | flag | discuss
I copy and paste it in to google, and find what looks to me like a reasonable article. It even has a CBS video source(1). It is a legit article and fits in HN guide lines. The submitter has a decent karma level too.
Why was it banned? Could one suggest that HN is protecting Larry Ellison from the likely criticism? Should I hold on to that, or will we get "openness", "transparency", and all the other things HN members seem to want from every one else?
Looking at these dead submissions makes HN look like one of the most oddly censored sites on the net. Many of them seem perfectly legitimate. Of course, I have no real idea how censored other sites are. Maybe we cant trust any one at all.
I'll tell members this: It would come as a real blow to find that a site and community one comes to trust, may not be trust-able after all. Title manipulation is bad enough, true, but what we have here is what we accuse others of, opaque censorship. With out frank explanation, I have to conclude that Hacker News is hypocritical.
Lastly, I do hope this isn't censored. Wouldn't that be ironic?
(1) http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57598390/tech-tycoon-l...
"ROSE: Let me just hear you clearly. You were saying whatever the NSA's doing is okay with me?
ELLISON: It's great. I wish, you know, it's great. It's essential. By the way, President Obama thinks it's essential.
It's essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It's absolutely essential."
And, even if we disagree, its a reasonable position to take.
Probably was just flagged to death because people are getting overloaded with NSA stories, especially when there is no new additions. I would probably have flagged it if I saw it, doesn't really advance the discussion and frankly, I don't come to HN for politics.
Alan is speaking about the "new" page, where you will routinely see dead articles if you have showdead enabled. In fact, if you reload the new page frequently you can see many articles that become dead the moment (effectively) they are posted. This isn't flagging; it's an automatic mechanism. It may be an automatic mechanism informed by previous heavy flagging of other articles from the same domain or any number of other heuristics, but it happens too quickly for it to be the result of user action on the specific article.
As far as I can tell, flagging affects the sorting algorithm for the home page (use of the user script "HN Slapdown" allows you to visualize each article's score versus its rank order, providing color coding to indicate heavily-flagged articles) but I have not in my admittedly short HN experience ever seen an article become dead as a direct result of flagging.
I have my own misgivings about the rigid title-normalization policy so I appreciate him and the op taking the time to ask some questions.
People also seem to flag stuff a lot even when there are new points made. That is, we have a gazillion articles about programming patterns, frameworks, or languages, NONE of which add "new facts"; which is fine, because they make new points, or even just old ones in an eloquent way.
The Snowden/NSA stuff was/is news, but there are also essays about the general situation. These also get flagged, and looking at dates, points, numbers of comments and positions on the front page is actually so SNAFU sometimes, I actually thought of scraping the first few pages and making a graph of position vs. time vs. points, just to find the interesting stuff that gets buried for some reason more easily.
frankly, I don't come to HN for politics.
Right. Then why do you and others engage in the political act of stifling discussion about a specific topic, for reasons you then don't apply to other topics as well?
I don't come to HN to masturbate about money and disruption; yet I'm sure if I just started flagging everything I don't like, I'd loose that privilege real quick.
Just yesterday, they had a video interview with Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit. Excellent interviewed, yet banned at HN.
If that is the case, then my request would be that its toned down, because to my eyes, it at least looks suspicious.
This is consistent with the site's elitist tendencies.
It is simply unacceptable.
A. We all know it happens. B. It's replacing it with the actual title written by the author. It can't be confused with words written by the OP.
Personally no rule is perfect and simple things like just changing it can work. We all know or quickly learn the rule.
It could be worst like reddit style where the titles have collapsed and are consistently emotive/sensational/misleading to get the clicks.
Sidenote: Why would someone down vote this parent comment?
I didn't (I can't downvote) but I would guess it's because it's wrong. See sker's comment above:
Right now there's a good example of this problem on the front page. The article about the Android/PRNG security flaw is aptly editorialized as "Google confirms Java and OpenSSL crypto PRNG on Android are broken," but the original article is titled "Some SecureRandom Thoughts," which is meaningless and I would never have clicked it under any circumstances. Thankfully the mods left this one alone.
And quadhome's response shows that he's the one who edited the title, so edits can be made that could be seen as putting words in the OP's mouth:
I revised the title for that link several times. My final edit lifted the style of the Ars Technica[1] headline, but specifically added the more technical "Java and OpenSSL crypto PRNG" that I worried would be incomprehensible to the layman...
I didn't until now.
I won't go as far as accusing HN for impersonation (if that's the name), but please, if you change original title, at least remove original submitter name.
If I have to hide my real identity here on HN because of such behaviour, this could be just a sign of more serious problem with this so called "moderation".
But it is not really karma related,.and more if people remember your nickname.
I happen to disagree with this policy and I think it's a somewhat overly rigid application of the guidelines. However, this is why it's happening, and it makes some sense from at least one perspective. And, after all, this is entirely pg's call to make.
Which included David Byrne's (slightly misinformed) thoughts on the Aaron Swartz case. As such I titled it something like "David Byrne on Aaron Swartz" - it was changed to "Civil Disobedience" (the title of the blog article).
Although the old title may be have been guilty of "editorialisation" in some sense, the new title gives no indication of why it would be of interest to HN readers.
I really think this policy does a considerable deal of harm.
It would take a change to the way things are presented, but what about having a title that is the same as the original article, and then another line -- a subtitle, if you will -- that (optionally) can contain the poster's rationale for contributing the link.
In this case it could be:
Civil Disobedience
<small>David Byrne on Aaron Swartz</small>
What the current guidelines actually say is: "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
What they SHOULD say is something like "Don't editorialize the titles".
Perhaps we should add an information criterion? E.g.
"Otherwise please use the original title — unless it is linkbait, or misleading (or uninformative) about the content of the article."
The issue as I see it is that the sum of parts is more than the whole; if less people of the calibre similar to yourself stop turning up then the site as whole starts to lose its value. Personally it's not enough to turn me away; maybe I have no taste :)
Having said that it is a subjective issue and opinions are like farts; everybody's stinks. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
It also avoids click baiting as most users probably can tell already by the url in how far a certain medium (...) uses sensationalist headlines.
If somebody thinks that there is a different view or a overlooked aspect in a linked submission that is not reflected by the headline it would probably be best to blog about it and resubmit the link to the blog.
The policy is public, it is consistently applied to any submission, even if you don't follow it the problem is fixed by an admin. I don't see any issue here that demands that kind of public outrage, let alone some kind of weird formal public letters.
Someone linked to his article about Ender's Game (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376820), which opens up with a comparison to pornography that he carries throughout. The original submission title was something like Ender's Game Review: It's Porn. It's an accurate edit.
Reading through the comments I found this exchange
> jimbokun 1723 days ago - Ugh. My kingdom for a submission down arrow. Citing Jesus and mocking Christianity as part of reviewing Ender's game totally jumps the shark. This is such an obvious troll, I am utterly disappointed that Hacker News has collectively up-modded this close to the top of the front page (as I write this). I thought this community was better than this.
>>pg 1723 days ago - Yeah, I thought the same thing. I considered killing it, but it didn't seem quite deliberately dishonest enough. I just took "it's porn" out of the title. I suspect that's why this got so much attention.
So, here's an author with a website full of essays talking about the issue with the unacknowledged self-selection bias that afflicts geeks, criticizing one of their most beloved works, and the response is "he must be fishing for views. let's not give him attention" (btw, Bonds' website does not have ads in it).
Truly bizarre.
pg is an asshat.
When I see something with Title A in the morning and re-click the link with Title B later in the day, and to my surprise they are not only the same article but the very same HN submission, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This happens a lot, perhaps because I'm on the East Coast and the mods are on the West?
I've started spending less and less time on HN partly due to this, and all the meta-discussion that it generates. Reddit has successfully managed to take these types of discussions off into subreddits where they can be safely ignored, it is the first discussion board of any significant note to not shove meta issues in front of everyone. I'm actually starting to wish that HN would become more like Reddit, in some ways.
Fine. It's just my blog, so be it. Like I said, it's my own fault for making a design that limits my title length, and I should correct that if I had a serious problem with the policy. But since I was asked at submission time to provide a title, I preferred giving the potential reader here at HN some added clarity about the subject matter before they clicked. I know as an HN reader, I don't like vague, short submission titles. I probably would have never clicked "Unfair comparisons" myself because I'd quickly think, "about what?" and move on.
Example:
Vulnerability in ICMPv6 could allow Denial of Service (was: Ping of Death Reloaded)
A few people are unfairly caught out by it, but they are usually told about it.
And the fact you see problem posters continuing to post on their banned accounts shows it works well enough to prevent those people just changing IP and creating new accounts.
Ummm, no. If so, why would they persist in posting using their hellbanned accounts.
In any case, there are numerous threads where people have said that they had no idea they were hellbanned.
ii) You can't tell people if they have no contact information in their profile. You can leave a post in the thread and hope the hellbanned poster sees it.
Shadow bans are so much different!
Source: I have a shadowbanned account.
Secondly, and more importantly, we are all about using algorithms to automate and take care of peskiness.
I applaud people who do that in nearly all circumstances.
Google has a strict policy of separating ads and organic, "do no evil". PG doesn't adhere to that. He even openly boasts about how he tricked his investors back in the day by having random people show up on meeting days, and encourages this type of behaviour in YCers - all the while expounding he doesn't like a-holes. Couple that with his decidedly evil hellbanning policy, he needs to do some serious soul-searching.
Do those posts get to go higher on less votes? I don't know but some proof would be nice before I agree.
And while its in context re: Google, as a personal bugbear, please reserve the word evil for events in Syria, and the like. Message boards don't come within spitting distance of evil.
Some can find it ok, many find it annoying, and some others, like me, find it good enough reason to hide, but no amount of moderation will make it disappear.
I don't really care if some modster change my submission title, but if my name is still there and someone googling for it can see it next to something I didn't wrote, then it is a big problem to me.
Like most internet discussion sites it's rather openly a benevolent dictatorship isn't it?
The mods change titles. This is mostly to try to normalize posts, so things with super linkbait titles don't always do well, and things with terrible titles don't always do poorly.
You are copying and pasting a link into a box and writing a few words. You are not doing real work. How the post does should be relevant to its content, not the few words you typed into the box.
I don't get this impression. If anything, I've found that original article titles are far more likely to be link-baity than editorialized versions. In addition, It's rare that I've seen a bad article title improved the way you're suggesting.
If anything, I've had the impression that this system is somewhat automated and original article titles are used if they differ significantly from the title submitted (triggered after some threshold).
This is true, but idealistic. "How the post does should be relevant [...]" is not the same as "How the post does is relevant [...]".
Some lousy articles with click baity headlines get upvotes.
And it's particularly frustrating when a neutral informative headline is changed back to the uninformative or clickbaity original headline of the article.
I agree there should be some marker to show the title has been edited, but I don't disagree with this particular edit.
"Goose - A JS library for 3D graphics" --> "Goose"
Yeah thanks guys.
Vulnerability in {windows} ICMPv6 could allow Denial of Service (microsoft.com) 15 points by vog 7 hours ago | 11 comments
I agree that it's a problem when the original title is lousy. Or when the original title is both lousy and longer than 80 chars.
> Result: I have never entered that crappy title, but receive the complaints!
It's frustrating that so many people made those comments - it's pretty obvious that an article from MS is going to be talking about how MS does stuff. If it helps I don't think the complaints are about you, but about MS. Because, you know, there are some companies which provoke that kind of reaction.
I agree that sometimes titles are changed to things that make no sense. That seems to be the rule, and it's consistently applied. That means that people do make comments about the title. This seems to work against PG's desire to avoid the "middlebrow dismissal".
As an aside: I'd love a plugin that helped with the text box. Something that highlighted 80 chars.
No it isn't. To quote one of the complaining comments:
| Sure it links to a Microsoft.com domain, but there are plenty of research projects hosted by Microsoft that are not necessarily on Windows
Ever heard of research.microsoft.com?
Yes.
The submission clearly says microsoft.com, not research.microsoft.com
Didn't you know that HN shows the research subdomain in submission titles?
EDIT: Sorry, this reply sounds a bit snarky.
EDIT2: I'm wrong! Thanks to TeMPOraL for pointing out my error about HNSearch and HN.
'HN to show subdomains' is, I think, number 1 requested feature, but it never was officially done. Is there a whitelist of domains somewhere that get their subdomains shown?
EDIT
Except it doesn't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4136016, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6108151, et al.
Make sure to remember that a) lots of HN plugins fix that, and b) hnsearch is NOT HN, even though it looks similar.
Oops. I didn't. Is there somewhere a written collection of rules to learn?
It's an annoying bug, it keeps getting raised as a problem, but it's never been dealt with.
Secondly, I expect a certain quality and professionalism level from HN. The administrators have every right to improve those things through editing of titles, marking some threads as dead, banning trolls, and setting up some basic guidelines for online behavior.
The Internet is such a big place. There are so many news aggregators, sources for the original news, places to discuss the news, why would you frequent/support a site that has a basic policy of quality maintenance that you find oppressive?
* Real-time notification when someone replies to my comment (or when someone upvotes, turned off by default).
* More openess and transparency.
* Speed. Just tried to open this comment page in another tab: 8 seconds. Seriously?
* Collapsible comments (I have to use an extension for that).
* Limit the max width of a comment text.
* Show newest submissions in some box on the homepage.
* Highlight new comments since last visit.
* Show top submissions for a specific day.
* Markdown support.
And many more.
e.g.
| Vulnerability in ICMPv6 could allow Denial of Service (Ping of Death Reloaded) (microsoft.com) 1 point by vog 9 minutes ago | discuss | edit | delete
I just logged into an (old) account[0] with no comments or submissions. It has 1 karma and as far as I could tell it was able to upvote no problem.
[0]826 days old. Can't for the life of me remember why I created it, or what (if anything) I did with it but the karma count was at 1 and there were no listed comments or submissions.
This is doubly frustrating: it's a stupid policy, and when the changes are this significant it makes me re-read links I've already read. Argh.
Really? Because I had no idea what the original title was referencing, whereas the new title gave an accurate summary.
Notifications in general would be great, but it takes away the simplicity that makes this site and community so great.
Beyond title changes and such, I think what the real request is for better curating.
Or at the very least add an 'updated' or asterisk or something next to the title when it gets changed.
That includes me. Maybe after the wedding, kid's baseball game, co-worker's going away party, and stuff this weekend.
It's not broken enough to drive most people away, and that's its prime benefit. But what I'd give for the same site, moderated differently...
For me, the question is knowing what exactly I'd do differently. On a lot of crucial points, I don't know and don't know how to find out (except experimentation).
If 5 people submit a link to the same url and 3 of them use the title "ABC" but the first submitted used "XYZ" then at some point the algo changes it from "XYZ" to "ABC".
Other than that, active moderation because of excessive editorializing by submitter.
This is how it's been for years. It's fine. You'll survive.
This may be a community, but it is not a democracy. The management and moderators of this website are free to do what they wish with the content that is submitted and the members are free to take their posts and opinion elsewhere if they don't like the policies.