As I see it, our differences of opinion on this topic stem largely from misunderstanding it. I think it's not at all clear what we're even talking about, so we wind up arguing about slightly different things and fail to come to a consensus.
I think that we need to really understand the purpose of these titles, and to also understand that different people mean different things by the word "title". In fact, I think we're talking about three distinct but related ideas: titles, names, and summaries.
A name is a word or phrase that identifies a thing. A name isn't necessarily descriptive and often has no more meaning than being a word or phrase denoting the thing it names. My name is Adam. That tells you very little about me. All you can do with that is to identify me.
A summary describes a thing. I am a software developer with a penchant for pedantry. That's a summary. It actually tells you something about my nature, which the name "Adam" does not.
A title is first and foremost a kind of name. Ideally, it's also a descriptive summary, though that's not required. As a name, the important thing is that it is as short and as unique as reasonable. That's more important that descriptiveness.
In my opinion, Hacker News links should not be titles, i.e. names, but rather short summaries. Using a title is fine, but only as long as it's also a good summary.
The point of the front page is to link to things that are new and fresh. Ideally, most people won't have seen most things, meaning few will be familiar with their names. A page of new names that nobody recognizes is pretty pointless. You might as well use randomly generated words for the links. Or numbers. Like item?id=8114336.
Instead of titles, I think links should be summaries. When they are summaries, they can provide some real information about the thing that is linked. That can be used to decide whether to invest time in clicking through. When a link is just a name, you have little information to base that decision on, so you have to click most of the links to know which are the interesting ones.
But, if all HN links are summaries, how will we know what to call the articles they link? Well, if the summary is interesting enough to want to talk about, you'll click the link and see the actual title. Names are unimportant on the HN front page. They only become useful in the comments, and by then you should have at least read the title of the article, if not the whole thing.
The original summary here was useful and information-packed without being too long: "Josh Bloch Fights a LIDAR Speeding Ticket (with Science)". I care that it's Josh Bloch. I care that he's using science, in court. I care that it's about LIDAR and not RADAR. The fact that it's Josh Bloch, and that he's using science to fight a ticket means he was probably wrongfully ticketed, implying weaknesses in LIDAR speed guns that I want to understand. I got all that from a good, short summary.
The new summary is just the title of the linked article, which in this case is mostly just a name: "The Lowdown on Lidar". So, it's about LIDAR generally? Or as opposed to RADAR? Given the use of "lowdown", it's probably it's about some stuff that isn't commonly known. Maybe. Or maybe it's a boring, entry-level article on range finding in general that happens to talk about LIDAR rather than RADAR or SONAR. The title tells me very little and is not helpful in deciding whether to click the link, though it is a good name that's short and easy to use when talking about the article. I enjoyed reading "The Lowdown on Lidar".
The most important and useful thing a main page link can do is to accurately and faithfully inform the reader about the contents of the link. Accurately naming the linked thing is neither important nor useful. That is especially not useful when the name given by the original author misrepresents the contents, as is sometimes the case.
Accuracy is important in general, but we must be clear about specifically which kind of accuracy matters most here.
Why not have mods vet the summaries, like they do with titles? Because it'd be way too much work to do that for all articles. Dozens make it to the frontpage each day. And then we'll run into situations where the mods haven't vetted a summary at night (because they're sleeping) so some linkbaity summary flairs up to the frontpage for no good reason. This is exactly what happens on Reddit, and it's the reason HN should maintain its current rule regarding titles.
Good content, not good titles, should define HN as a community.
But I'd rather have the odd editorialised title slipping through, than a large collection of bland, meaningless and decontextualised link titles. The current situation makes HN titles far inferior.
Good. HN titles being inferior will attract fewer new users.
Mission accomplished?
I don't see the purpose of having mods vet all titles or summaries. I don't think titles need any special blessing by an elite caste of users. I don't think it's important that titles be in any way "official" or even neutral.
Perhaps I'm not concerned because I also don't see duplicate posts as being especially bad. Maybe they are a bit annoying sometimes, but there are worse problems in the world. Why not simply embrace duplicates and let the best title rise to the top? Certainly people occasionally post comments saying essentially the same thing. There, we just let the voting system do what it does and push the best version to the top. Why not do that with titles as well? The only problem I can see is that conversations may be fragmented -- but copy/paste is super easy. Links in comments are easy to create and to follow.
The only real need I see for moderators is to occasionally deal with a flagrantly abusive link. Even that is questionable.
I think people are smart. We're mostly adults here, and we aren't easily controlled with blatantly editorialized links. I don't see any danger that we need protection from.
I guess the point I'm attempting to argue is that this particular policy is suboptimal and should be changed. Of course, when a policy or consensus exists, we should follow it. When it's a bad policy, we should follow it until we change it or remove it. I think we should change this.
My position basically boils down to a worse-is-better argument. I think the desire to maximize accuracy with original titles actually harms the conversation more than inaccuracies and editorializing in information-packed summaries.
What matters to me in this case is the signal-to-noise ratio, not the absolute level of noise in the data. Original titles can be "cleaner" and less noisy, but they also have relatively little information, or signal. I would rather have twice the noise if it gives me three times the signal.
I even see the noise as useful in a way. It adds color. Even when a title is inaccurate, it's sometimes interesting to think about how or why it is inaccurate. A little mess never killed anybody, and can even keep us healthy. Ultimately, if I'm so busy I don't have enough time to be occasionally mislead by a click-bait title, then I don't really have time to spend on HN in the first place.
I think the right way to deal with inaccurate titles is either to simply ignore them, or maybe to downvote them and to upvote duplicate posts with better titles. But won't HN then turn into reddit? I don't think so.
See, I think we try to fix too many things with laws where we should instead use social pressure. The reason that Americans don't litter very much isn't that it's now a ticketable offense. It's that we have decided that litterers are idiots and everybody hates them. The reason many subreddits are cesspools isn't the lack of rules, it's that they're populated by people who haven't collectively figured out a better way to behave -- or who don't particularly value the benefits of that different behavior. Adding a new rule won't fix anything if people don't understand and accept the purpose behind the rule. And if they understand the purpose, they usually don't need the rule.
Someone could argue that HN is something of a cesspool because so many comment threads go off topic. Like this one. Some people despise that. In general, though, HN users generally seem to appreciate an off-topic conversation so long as it's adding value. What we don't approve of is comments that don't add value. But, we don't need rules for that. It's just our commonly accepted behavior. Other groups have different values, and that's ok.
I agree. From the random weighting down of certain articles, to title changes, to just flat-out removing/flaging some posts... it seems HN is becoming a "whatever the Mod who happens to be on today feels like" site -- which really detracts from the awesomeness of HN -- I'm not looking for a gatekeeper news site - if I wanted that, I'd go to CNN or something.
Although the logical outcome of this would be some kind of graph generated for each thread that plots upvotes, downvotes, mod actions, user edits etc. over time but that would be insane...
I think dang is working hard to be transparent about this topic. You can see a number of examples of this by reading through the following search result [1].
Cases in point:
He has reverted titles to their original form... "Ok, we'll change the title back again." [2]
He is open to suggestions...
"If anyone suggests a better title, I'll change it again." [3]
"That's a fair suggestion and we changed the title accordingly." [4]
"We'd happily change the title if someone can propose a more accurate and neutral one." [5]
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/0/author%3Adang%20...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050702
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7557464
Why not just implement a title history feature? Mods can change title, then users can click a link to show title history.
For extra points, you could make the title history page a poll/voting system which allows users above n karma, registered for x months to vote on their preferred title. Top voted title after y votes and z time after initial title change is what's used.
So would I. Last time I mentioned this I got my head bit off (that's how it's always been!!). I don't care. It could AND SHOULD be better and WILL be if we demand it.
I guess they're trying to keep the title to match the title of the link/article. But sometimes the article just has a bad title. This slideshow is a great read, but with a title that puts me to sleep.
It's not possible to mentally queue up items to read throughout the day. All the titles will have changed by that point.
The question has been asked, and answered, very many times.
The guidelines have advice about threads like these: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The original title of the post wasn't a comment on the content, but rather somewhat of a subtitle, which provided a better description.
The mods changed the title, which in that case made it less misleading, but they didn't leave any comment to say what the old title was. My comment no longer made any sense, and because a few hours had passed, I couldn't edit it to add a footnote for confused readers (and plus, I couldn't remember the precise wording of the original title).
I can understand why the titles are sometimes changed and most of the time I think it's for the better (although this time I agree it was a bad choice). What I would like to see added is a changelog feature, so that whenever the mods change a title, a footnote appears directly below the summary, before comments, showing who changed the title, what it had been, and optionally the reason it was changed.
As for your factual claim, the post has been sitting near the top of the front page for 16 hours now.
Hell, lots of times I'll load 10 HN threads in my browser, to read later ... and then later when I get to them I refresh to start with the latest comments, look at the headline, and think "Um? When did I click on this? And where's that thread about ___? I think I clicked on that before ..."
If you have an opinion on a submission, submit a comment to it.
If you don't like the title, blame the author. Mods, afaik, are just trying to follow the rule that the submission should reflect the title of the article.
Josh Bloch Fights a LIDAR Speeding Ticket (with Science)
Which is much better than the currently edited version.
1. Josh Bloch is an author of particular interest to this community.
2. When I searched to see if the page had already been submitted, I noted that recent HN posts on LIDAR were on technical laser ranging (e.g. in mapping applications), not on speed enforcement.
3. I thought it was an article that would be of interest to HN readers, so I thought they would be well-served by an appealing link title which conveyed the content and tone of the presentation and invited a click.
> 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.
and
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
The submitter didn't do this.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
Guidelines != rules. Sometimes authors write poor headlines (this is a great example). The community benefits from headlines that are more descriptive of the article. Having mods change them back for consistency's sake harms HN more than it helps.
The thing the mods are trying to avoid is link baiting, and they tend to err on the side of "no exceptions". I prefer this, as any other option may lead to more unintentional bias, or worse.
Regardless, I still would have preferred the original title. Perhaps removing the reference to Josh Bloch (and, perhaps, the parenthetical "with science") could have been dropped to reduce its link baity-ness.
As an addendum, I clicked on the link and read the article after the title had been changed to match the article's title, so perhaps my stated preference, as an afterthought, is completely unfounded.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Your title is link-baity. "Beats speeding ticket" and "with science" are obvious link bait. I'm kind of surprised that you thought your replacements would stick.
And I think it's relevant that the content of the presentation is scientific/analytic, rather than related to using legal strategies to invalidate a speeding ticket, for example.
Not in my opinion. The speeding ticket Mr. Bloch fights is a secondary point to the main purpose of the presentation.
Titles have a context (which the author considered when they chose it). That context doesn't exist when it sits enumerated on the HN front page, invalidating the canonical title argument.
For instance when the author of this piece shared this, they did so under their own twitter account (coupling it with a name), and the supporting commentary "I gave this talk at a CA traffic ticket defense attorney seminar. Comments appreciated.". If these two elements didn't exist, and it was just tossed onto some pile of titles, it would be ignored.
I write a blog about software development, particularly financial and database related matters. I have vague titles like "Dealing with Variance" that makes total sense in the context of my blog and its readership, but is completely meaningless title outside of it.
While I do think there has been good transparency about title changes (a mod usually comments), the whole "what the original author intended" argument is misled.
However, there is also a strong argument to be made that there are good articles with lame titles (such as this one) which would otherwise be glossed over without a title change. Maybe the best solution would be to add a summary field to submissions, restricted to an 80-character, purely factual synopsis of the article's contents. It could show up smaller, beneath the submission headline, like a subtitle.
This way, you gain the benefits of editorialization (providing pertinent info highlighting the article's appeal to HN readers) while minimizing most of the downsides (loss of info provided in the title, misconstruction of the author's intent).