Techmeme is now writing its own headlines | Hacker News Reader

Techmeme is now writing its own headlines

news.techmeme.com

31 pointsdbin7814 comments

"You're changing the words that publishers use, and that's wrong." It's adding to the words publishers use, and it's long been an accepted practice on aggregation sites like Drudge Report, Arts & Letters Daily, and many more.

It should be noted that this appears to be the opposite philosophy of Hacker News's headline rewrites, which focus more on minimalism and succinctness, for better or for worse.

And using Drudge Report as an example.... not really that good of an idea.

For worse, since we complain about it endlessly. Headlines should do their job quietly, not cause this uproar.

For a moment there I thought they were saying that the site itself wrote its own headlines. You know, with artificial intelligence etc. That would have peaked my interest.

Alas, no. They use people.

The nut of why they're doing it (and relevant to sites like HN as well):

[C]licking on stories merely to discover what they're about is a frustrating chore. Unlike most other news sites, we'd rather save our readers clicks than force them through a maze of pages to catch up on news. Techmeme therefore values headlines rich on specifics: headlines with names, numbers, and active verbs. Headlines that function as abstracts.

Unfortunately for us, publishers understandably write headlines suiting their own needs, and not necessarily ours. The reasons for this are numerous, and varied:

[…useful list of original-headline problems elided…]

As a result, Techmeme is often forced either to post a story with a nebulous headline, wait for a publication that rewrites the news with a clear headline (leading many publishers to wonder why) or pass on stories altogether. Since all of these choices are far from ideal, we've now resolved to produce Techmeme-optimized titles "in-house".

I'd love to see an HN/Reddit-like site that, just as it has a never-ending tournament for story ranking, has a mini-tournament on each story for the most informative headline.

Why stop at a headline? Why not a /.-like summary or quote that represents the article? Headlines are made for enticing clicks, not informing the reader.

Have you checked out http://thetechblock.com recently? I like what they're doing.

I'd agree, another subhed-line or even short blurb could be added to the collaborative-tournament process.

The headlines purpose is to inform the reader so they will be enticed to read more. If it doesn't do this, it's a badly written headline, it doesn't need to be patched, but re-written right.

Enticement is a goal of providers with certain models. Readers want an accurate indication of whether the target contains new and useful information. These goals can often conflict. Techmeme is more aligned with the readers, here.

Not always easy to find the right balance - put all the info in the headline, and you'll get more RTs than clicks; but teasing can also go too far - @HuffPoSpoilers always cracks me up!

has a mini-tournament on each story for the most informative headline.

Sometimes it seems like HN is quite the opposite- editor changes to headlines are often more ambiguous than the original titles.

One annoying thing about Techmeme is the linked tweets, they are just snarky comments from famed critics on twitter. Majority of the time, they do not add any value but a tongue in cheek remark. I would like them to be more selective in linking tweets, and adding insightful tweets.

YC Hacker News is an aggregator based on voting. Techmeme is an aggregator based on human editing.

The new change should not be surprising.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com