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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

Dear mods: please stop 'de-editorializing' headlines when the alternative won't make any sense. The new title for this link is nigh-unintelligible.

(the previous title was something like "Go 1.5 will add support for building iOS apps")

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Take the sample bias out of your request and generalize it to all of HN, and what you're asking will no longer sound so trivial.

Submitters make up titles all the time that are (to use the sibling comment's words) "clear, descriptive", and wrong. Set aside the fact that HN's rules explicitly ask people not to do that. What would you have us do?

If you say "never change them", that would flood HN with false and manipulative titles forever. (Not that this one was false and manipulative—I wouldn't know. But I do know that that would be the consequence of never changing titles.) If you say "change the ones that are false and keep the ones that are true", you're asking us to be experts on everything.

The submitted title was "Go 1.5 will have iOS support". The submitted web page says nothing of the sort. What should we do? Being an expert on the Go project's internal progress—that is, being an expert on everything in the general case—is not an option. So we look for language in the article itself that is representative of what it says. That has two merits: (1) it preserves the neutral quality of HN's front page and (2) it's doable.

If you'd like to propose a change that doesn't demand superhuman powers of us and wouldn't destroy the character of HN, please do. But getting upset over a single suboptimal example doesn't seem serious to me. HN sees a thousand stories a day. Not every example is going to come out optimal no matter what we do.

Hi Dan - fair point. To be pedantic, though, the title of this article should then be

    Change Ibc23b6d3: cmd/gomobile: enable target=ios
    builds | go-review.googlesource Code Review

which a) doesn't fit, and b) doesn't make any sense. A potential technical fix would be to allow both titles and descriptions on posts with URLs.

Even pedantically, that's not true: the HN guidelines have never said you must always use the original title. Pedantry aside, the important thing above is language in the article itself that is representative of what it says. That's both why we changed the title and what we changed it to.

> allow both titles and descriptions on posts with URLs.

I appreciate the suggestion, but we're unlikely to do that. On HN, submitting a story conveys no special rights, and submitters do not get to frame the story for everybody else. Framing it for everybody else effectively means controlling the discussion. We want discussion to be driven by the article itself, not a single user's spin. If a submitter wishes to offer a description or say what they think is important about a story, they're welcome to do so by adding a comment to the thread on the same footing as everybody else.

> Set aside the fact that HN's rules explicitly ask people not to do that.

Didn't know that. Why don't remind that on the "Post to YC" page?

Agreed. I'm all for cracking down on title bait, but this is just going too far. This submission had a clear, descriptive title, and now it completely lacks context.

I submitted this news few hours back with that title based on the tweet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9812968

Edit: not exact same title, but similar.

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