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Comment by joemaller1 | Hacker News Reader

Why link BoingBoing and not directly to her actual blog post?

http://vihart.com/google-youtube-integration-kind-of-like-tw...

Her actual blog post has been submitted [1], too, but it has a very nondescriptive title "Google+ YouTube Integration" so it had no chance of getting upvoted to HN frontpage.

I mean, the title is a good title for her blog, but as it does not mention Vi Hart (and why would it, it's her blog), it makes a very nondescriptive title for a HN submission.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719069

As HN policy is to keep the original titles of the submitted links, this probably has the consequence that only original content that has an "upvote-able" title, can reach HN frontpage.

If the original content is good, but has a "non-upvote-able" title, then the only way for that kind of news to reach HN frontpage is if a third party re-blogs about them with a better title.

As happened in this case.

That's kind of a terrible side effect, isn't it?

I understand the existing policy as it is used to prevent editorializing, but it's unfortunate that this burying of interesting/original content can also result.

PG posted about it recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466 He basically said it's an acceptable loss compared to policing linkbait.

IMHO the net effect is detrimental to the community. Points should not be awarded by clicking on an article or at least should be taken away by the community somehow in case of click bait.

The way the system is now encourages the creation of almost empty blog posts basically just linking to the actual interesting news just to attract more clicks. It does not promote the interesting news to the top of the page, which is the purpose of the system. Editorializing will occur be it here or outside, in said blog posts.

At the end of the day what matters is that it's really hard to judge a article based on just one line of text and past experience with the source; using this judgement to rank with high influence is an error. The implementation here is well balanced, but not perfect.

As suggestions I would like to leave these:

Greater importance to upvotes, especially on new stories;

Make votes reflect toward the user's karma, encouraging active participation on the ranking;

Evaluate votes relatively, both for stories' ranking and users' karma, taking into account if the user votes a lot, how critical he is of articles, how his votes correlate with the reading interests of the rest of the population(but be careful not to drive away different opinions), etc.;

Measure time between interactions with HN to know how much time was likely spent on the article;

Make better use of the workforce reading the "new" page by showing them personalized pages with what they haven't seen yet

I suspect it has the opposite effect; rather, it promotes spammy linkbait reblog content on HN.

Coming soon: An automated article wrapper whose sole purpose is to re-title otherwise interesting articles?

You pretty much just described the entire business model of Gawker, Business Insider, and the Huffington Post.

That's kind of a terrible side effect, isn't it?

Yes.

And it's a well-known property of the policy.

I think it would be helpful if HN allowed an optional inclusion of author name along with title which could be displayed next to the title. The author of an article is more often than not the only additional context needed to make a link title interesting or relevant. You could simply append "by Paul Graham" after the actual title of Paul's posts.

I know HN doesn't want us to continue to discuss this issue in threads that are not directly related to talking about HN's title policy. However, there will be literally no stopping this discussion from popping up again and again because it is an actual problem for readers of the site and it will take every new reader of the site being told why things are broken in this way before they stop asking about it in unrelated threads. I find it interesting that Paul continues to hold to his position that it's an acceptable problem to have when there is a constant stream of readers signaling it is a real problem with the site. This post is one very clear example of exactly why it's a real problem.

I can see at least two ways to address it without spending more money on moderators. 1. Allow volunteer moderation and trust those moderators like Stack Overflow does. This is a solution that has been proved workable time and time again. 2. Give users a way to add some additional context to posts. Author name being included in the title is the bare minimum needed but I can think of a few other helpful pieces of contextual information as well.

Author and other metadata are actually part of the parsing spec used (and promoted) by Readability.

This would be useful.

Well, that made my head hurt in a hurry. I've used Readability in the past, but was completely unaware of their API, and so I lazily searched it and the top result was a Ruby implementation on Github[1]. Alright cool, it does expose a lot of values.

Wait, what's this in the sample code?

    article = ReadabilityParser.parse("http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html")

Hrmm. And apparently the author is a HN'r, though they haven't done much in the past year...

1. https://github.com/phildionne/readability_parser

She must have amended it, or maybe the HN submission was truncated, because the title as it stands now on her blog is:

"Google+ YouTube Integration: Kind of Like Twilight, Except In This Version When +Cullen Drinks BellaTube’s Blood They Both Become Mortal, But +Cullen Is Still An Abusive Creep, Also It Is Still Bad"

How to make a bad title worse.

Might be to avoid that very, very bright background.

I'm somehow seeing a blurry yellow line down the middle of the white area, which I think is an illusion caused by the yellow on the sides. It's quite painful to read.

Why do I suddenly taste lemons?

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