I understand mods edit titles and have said so to “de-editorialize/sensationalize” them but I’m seeing a lot of purely style changes; capitalization removal. Some are changes entirely from perfectly fine and comprehensible titles that aren’t even sensationalized headlines
Others still add or remove a word that don’t really do anything for the title except change the inflection slightly to one the author may not even want perceived from their writing.
Whom does that sort of edit serve? Merely curious.
It serves the will of HN according to justifications I’ve seen. It’s debatable if it is always is helpful in any individual instance, but it’s usually well-intentioned from what I can tell. Yet it also seems to turn the volume down on topics that are of outsize influence or import on society, to my reading. It second-guesses the intent of the author, and second-guesses the reading comprehension of the reader. It treats us all like clickbait vote bots.
21:40
Gertrude Elion, a woman who gave the world antiviral drugs
↓
22:40
The woman who gave the world antiviral drugs
Like, at what point is well enough alone for a headline that was already succinct, descriptive and well formed and why keep coming back an hour later-after presumably more people have seen the article and may want to come back later-to change the title again?
@dang (if you come across this): is HN remotely interested, for the curiosity satiating edification of the community-if no other reason-in sharing the decision calculus for these kinds of title edits?
But you've omitted the last title in that sequence, which is the one we ended up with (Gertrude Elion's “antiviral odyssey”). There's a partial explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24359017
What you're seeing in that sequence is trial and error. Sometimes it takes a few tries before we find a solution that feels like it balances the different concerns. That's not particularly common, though, plus most of those exploratory edits are quickly overwritten by later edits, so Peter's app doesn't pick them up.
I'm happy in principle to satiate anyone's curiosity about this kind of thing—the only trouble is that it takes a surprising amount of time to write out such explanations in details, and unfortunately that time is just not often not available. What I can tell you is that (1) there is nearly always a specific reason for every title edit we do, and there are probably at least a hundred different considerations that come into it, based on 10+ years of experience at this point—this is a surprisingly complex subdomain!, and (2) we're highly responsive to user complaints about titles (or mod edits) in specific cases. Not just because we want users to be happy, but also because this has proven to be the only way to minimize the dreaded title fever (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) —which, btw, has had an outbreak in this very thread.
I've written longer explanations in the past about how we approach title editing in general. One is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573. If there are questions I'd be happy to answer them—but again, the more general the question, the more time/energy it takes to answer, so I may not be able to.
Actually I enjoy engaging with users about HN title edits because, of all the things we do, it's by far the best worked out. It's far more consistent than people think it is. Why does something consistent appear so inconsistent? Because it's more complicated than it seems. Why is title editing so complicated? Because titles are the biggest single influence on the site, and users are astonishingly passionate about them.
Taking all of that in-and thank you for offering what you’ve been able to this far-will HN moderation team consider making time to the community for a “town hall”/“AMA” going over some of the more opaque or otherwise commonly misunderstood elements of what informs the moderation strategies and tactics deployed in the community?
Given that you’ve stated doing so presently would be an unwieldy and rather involved affair, opening the opportunity for such a transparent display of community engagement at a later date seems like a charitable ask of you?
Such meta threads tend to be rather blah. Also, when dealing with large internet audiences you eventually come to realize that everything is "commonly misunderstood", because no matter how often or how thoroughly you explain things, the vast majority of users don't see it, and the percentage that did see it shrinks over time as new users flow in. So the idea of explaining things to the bulk of the community is sort of a fantasy. The sum of all explanations has measure zero. I'm not happy about that but it is as it is.
I'm happy to answer questions and do it every day, but it's better to stick closer to where actual examples come up. What else do you still want to know?
Yeah it's the mods. Easily the most annoying thing about HN these days. I really wonder if they consider the original author at all, and how they are editing their piece for them without permission.
I get that there are a lot of shitty 'click-bait' titles but that's just how it goes. Once you start changing those you're down the path of changing any title submission for who knows what reason(s). I've seen it over-and-over and I really don't get it. HN is so hands-off generally this behavior is truly puzzling.
https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/