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greyskull | 3 years ago

I always wondered why reddit decided to make that inextricable link. Any insight on why post titles aren't editable?

I thought maybe it's a database optimization, but it could also just be an unfortunate design decision.

discuss

order

jedberg|3 years ago

We added titles to the URL for SEO purposes -- Google told us that search terms in URLs rank higher. That's why all the blogging software puts the post title in the URL.

Fun fact that, it's actually optional on reddit. You can put anything you want there and it will still work. These two are the same:

https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/v3ae16/rantiwork_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/v3ae16/grayskull_...

The reason we made you unable to edit titles is to avoid the bait and switch. Getting a bunch of upvotes and then changing it. If you want to say, "well how about in the first five minutes" our counterargument was, "just delete the post and make a new one". It kept the software simpler.

markstos|3 years ago

Besides technical reaosns, it could be to avoid bait-and-switch schemes, where a lot of engagement is built around one headline, and then it's changed to something with a completely different meaning.

TwelveNights|3 years ago

I've always thought that Twitter adopted the same line of thinking, preventing tweets from being editable.

cultartawayyyi|3 years ago

A lot of MVC sites do this - it's descriptive to both humans and robots.

If a URL ends with something like "/1234-content-goes-here", you can often shorten it to "/1234" and get a successful redirect.