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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood the need for putting the source of the article in the title of the submission. It's usually not important (I have no idea what The Distance is), it can be confusing (is The Distance the name of the tannery?) and it's printed literally right after the title of the submission (thedistance.com). I see it all the time, though, mostly on other sites like Reddit (Major Political Scandal Breaking - Forbes (forbes.com)).

Why?

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Outside the context of HN, many sites put their name after the name of the article in the article's TITLE element (usually with a separator like a pipe or chevron) so that if the user bookmarks the article the site name is included in the text of the bookmark. That has value, though less than it used to now that browsers display the site's favicon with the bookmark.

In the context of submitting to HN, though, you're right, it makes no sense. My guess is that people just grab the content of the TITLE element and don't bother doing the extra work to strip the site name out.

The HN guidelines specifically ask submitters to take the title out:

If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Quite. We've edited the title accordingly.

just so you have more information about where you're going to be sent and the source of said article. It's that simple.

Doesn't the little gray "(thedistance.com)" after the title accomplish that pretty effectively, though?

If I had to guess, they just pulled the title from the title field of the page. Nothing to get knotted up about, though.

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