That submitter broke the site guidelines by changing the article title when it was neither misleading nor clickbait—so we changed it back. Also, we've found that when a title is gratuitously numerical, it makes for worse discussion. Why? I don't know. It just does. Therefore, if anything, we take numbers out rather than add them in. For the same reason, we wrote software to abbreviate "1,000,000" to "1M", "1,000,000,000" to "1B" and so on. Numbers in titles are baity and long numbers baitier.
> Isn't "star designers" more subjective than "executives"?
> Why make the headline less informative? [...] Data leaks from Facebook and LinkedIn has different implications than a leak from LexisNexis or a random blog.
That submitter broke the site guideline against editorializing. It's editorializing to cherry-pick the details that you consider important and put them in the title. That amounts to the power to determine the story for everyone else, and on HN, submitters don't get such power. We prioritize authors; submitters have no special rights over a story. If a submitter wants to say what they think is important about an article, they're welcome to do that in the comment thread, on a level playing field with everyone else.
In fact there was a lot of data leaked in that leak, not just LinkedIn's and Facebook's. That's another important. Putting famous names in a title makes it baitier and evokes lower-quality discussion, because it activates everyone's pre-cached responses about the famous names. If anything, we are inclined to take famous names out of a title, and certainly not to add them in.
> Again, why remove info? The fact that CloudFlare is behind this is more interesting
Because cloudflare.com is right next to the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21605719. From the guidelines: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
> Same complaint. This distinguishes a random person making a random gripe from freakin' Mozilla
Hmm... hey, petercooper, perhaps you should consider including the submission website in the edit tracker somehow? Without that, anyone who reads the edit tracker is missing an important piece of information that actual HN readers see.
> Also, we've found that when a title is gratuitously numerical, it makes for worse discussion. Why? I don't know.
This is interesting and an example of this happened recently in a post that ended up on the front page with 50+ comments. It was titled "100k+ page views a month for $5 with a self-hosted static site".
I chose that title because it kind of sets the stage of what to expect (a small / medium tier site being hosted cheaply) but it did bring in a number of comments where some people dropped in with "but that's only 0.04 posts per second, anything could host that!" which kind of detracts from the content of the submission which had nothing to do with saying those numbers are impressive in any way.
It's definitely a tricky balance and is so context specific. I think that post without the numbers wouldn't have gotten much engagement because "How I build, deploy and host my static site" isn't that interesting at a glance and I wonder if you came to the same conclusion because the title wasn't edited other than capitalization.
Yes, that one is a borderline case. Actually I included it in my GP comment as an example, and said we decided to leave it up except for downcasing it! But then I removed that bit, because the comment is so long.
That submitter broke the site guidelines by changing the article title when it was neither misleading nor clickbait—so we changed it back. Also, we've found that when a title is gratuitously numerical, it makes for worse discussion. Why? I don't know. It just does. Therefore, if anything, we take numbers out rather than add them in. For the same reason, we wrote software to abbreviate "1,000,000" to "1M", "1,000,000,000" to "1B" and so on. Numbers in titles are baity and long numbers baitier.
> Isn't "star designers" more subjective than "executives"?
That title changed because we switched to a different URL and updated the title to match the new article. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616157.
> Why make the headline less informative? [...] Data leaks from Facebook and LinkedIn has different implications than a leak from LexisNexis or a random blog.
That submitter broke the site guideline against editorializing. It's editorializing to cherry-pick the details that you consider important and put them in the title. That amounts to the power to determine the story for everyone else, and on HN, submitters don't get such power. We prioritize authors; submitters have no special rights over a story. If a submitter wants to say what they think is important about an article, they're welcome to do that in the comment thread, on a level playing field with everyone else.
In fact there was a lot of data leaked in that leak, not just LinkedIn's and Facebook's. That's another important. Putting famous names in a title makes it baitier and evokes lower-quality discussion, because it activates everyone's pre-cached responses about the famous names. If anything, we are inclined to take famous names out of a title, and certainly not to add them in.
> Again, why remove info? The fact that CloudFlare is behind this is more interesting
Because cloudflare.com is right next to the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21605719. From the guidelines: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
> Same complaint. This distinguishes a random person making a random gripe from freakin' Mozilla
Same answer: mozilla.org is right next to the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599496. Avoiding repetition is part of HN being organized around curiosity.