And here we go again with the title changes. Dude, whoever you are, would you please f%^#ng stop? This is not helping. Saying "Drupal Developer" clearly lets anybody reading this site know that the person in question is "one of us." Changing it now means that the only people who will pay attention are the ones who happen to know who Aaron Winborn is.
Original title: "A Drupal Developer is Dying and Needs Your Help."
The new title reduces the information and context about the article by several orders of magnitude, which is a tragedy given the gravity of the situation.
To all who read this comment, please upvote the OP so that it stays on the front page longer and signals "must read" with its large number of upvotes.
This heavy-handed re-titling of HN posts has got to stop. If any incident can clearly demonstrate why, this is it.
This is exactly correct. Information content in headlines is important, and clearly the moderator is incompetent at this role. You have to tell people why they should care, and the target page title probably is NOT good at that. In 99% of cases, the target page title will be a bad title on HN.
If the moderator disliked the direct appeal for aid in the original headline (I speculate, since he has not deigned to defend his editing), a proper title would be something along the lines of "Drupal developer has ALS, appeals for help". If Winborn is better known, you could go with "Drupal developer Winborn has ALS, appeals for help". If he's very widely known, you can assume most readers know who he is and go with "Aaron Winborn has ALS, appeals for help".
This conveys all the information needed for readers to evaluate the link, without being a direct emotional appeal.
I'd be happy to give the HN moderators a class in editing if they like. Editing is a learnable skill. Or, more likely, the HN moderators can continue fucking it up.
Mods need to take account of context when reviewing titles.
The context the original title in the blog post is totally different from here on HN hence the desirability of a different title. It's just good UX to take into consideration the different end user.
You know, I'd put $20 down that a moderator wrote a script that scrapes the front page every N minutes and then compares titles on the submission to the title of the link and fixes it if they differ. It was probably just a quick experiment, much like many of the changes on HN.
I think HN should implement the same restrictions as Reddit (Yes, I said it), nobody can change the title once the post has been submitted. This ensures consistency throughout the post's lifetime.
Submitters do occasionally badly editorialize titles so there is some need for editors to fix them, but of late there really has been an extremely overzealous HN editor or two at work.
Actually, at this point I'd agree - I'd rather have immutable submitter-editorialized titles than editors butchering half the submissions.
Submitters do occasionally badly editorialize titles so there is some need for editors to fix them, but of late there really has been an extremely overzealous HN editor or two at work.
Yep, exactly. I don't have a problem with editors fixing titles that are full of gratuitous spin or editorializing. But lately it seems that they're all but enforcing a policy of "every link must have the original page title and nothing else" and that's just silly.
> Submitters do occasionally badly editorialize titles so there is some need for editors to fix them
Someone should try making a website like this, except use the upvotes and downvotes of its users to determine which titles and articles are worthy of being shown.
As there is always bashing over the "fixed" headline issue, let me take here a bit of an contrarian position. In the past my titles have been changed numerous times but I slowly came around and even found it somewhat a good idea.
# I think the problem is less with Hacker News but more with the authors of the original articles who are unable to write a decent topic for a posting. If an author is unable to communicate his message in the headline, it might be better to use another source.
# The fixing effect is in my opinion positive. The click baiting title rises up in the top news, but get reversed to some boring, non descriptive headline. It hopefully gets people curious why this news is in the top X and click on it. This has the effect that they are conditioned to read not always the most "screaming" headlines but also stories with weaker headlines.
# As an overall effect, the top news stories don't look like a shouting match where the scariest story wins. Instead it features also stories that have boring headlines and more a content over headline oriented approach.
Of cause this whole argument is somewhat arbitrary in your case, where a real life is at stake.
So, would we be better off with <a href="http://www.link-to-site.com/ /> and no link text? Surely not. As someone else said, the information with a link will depend on the context/audience.
Without a title like "Aaron Winborn (Drupal developer) - Special Needs Trust donations", I read the entire original story and a few of the comments before I realised that this must be someone known in a particular programming community.
If an author is unable to communicate his message in the headline
The author is writing a title appropriate for the location the article is posted at. That context may be critical and is missing once the article winds up on HN.
The fixing effect is in my opinion positive.
I would say it is net positive, but that doesn't mean there aren't cases that are significantly negative.
The top news stories don't look like a shouting match where the scariest story wins.
This is a false dichotomy. We can have sane editing of titles that give us context without leaving shouting matches.
The problem with "sane" editing is, that it is much more difficult to enforce than just a simple - always the original headline - rule. The story here is an exception as it is a personal interest theme. But as soon as we are in more subjective terms (e.g. "writing up" the successes of a project) I can imagine many comments discussing if the spin on a headline is still okay or across the line. Plus if somebody is convinced that the original story absolutely needs the editorializing it might be better to express this not just in a headline but to write a blogpost etc on it.
