Why we revert to original titles

[pg]

In the HN guidelines, we ask submitters to use original titles when possible. When they don't, we often change the title of a post back to the original title of the article.

There is an ongoing trickle of complaints about this, as if we were engaged in some sort of sinister conspiracy.

Titles on HN are not self-expression the way comments are. Titles are common property. The person who happens to submit something first shouldn't thereby get the right to choose the title for everyone else. This would be clearer if we didn't let submitters enter a title-- if our software simply let people submit urls, and retrieved the title from the page. We don't do this because it's too inflexible. Some articles have titles that are too long. In others the subtitle makes a better title. But the fact that a title field is editable doesn't make it comment.

It's true that when submitters change titles, their new titles often contain more information than the article's original title. But a significant percentage of the extra information added in this way is false. The only way we can tell if a newly created title is accurate is to read the article, and we're not about to read every article submitted to HN. The only option is to revert to the original title, which is at least what the author intended.

(We do sometimes change titles from the original when the original title is egregious linkbait, or false. We have also, since the beginning when our users were largely YC alumni, put e.g. (YC S13) after the names of YC companies in titles. But these are not the types of changes users mean when they complain about moderators changing titles.)

If we had infinite attention to spend on moderation, we could read every article and decide whether each user-created title was better than the original title. But we don't. Moderating HN is no one's full time job. And frankly it's not that big a deal anyway. If we're going to expend cycles trying to fix something about HN, the increasing prevalence of mean and stupid comments has a much higher priority than the fact that authors' original titles are not maximally informative.

[kenneth]

I think the biggest problem in reverting to original titles is that oftentimes, the original title is not bad, but it only makes sense in the context of the original blog in which it appears. In a social aggregator, it suddenly doesn't make sense anymore.

Consider this title:

    A New Beginning

In the context of the PHP blog, it might indicate a change of direction of the project, a change of leadership, etc. It's a decently sensible title. On a social aggregator like HN, it is much less useful, even if printed next to a small (php.net).

We'd be better off if we let the submitted change it to:

    PHP project changes direction, elects new leader

[Fuzzwah]

I've come across so many examples where a perfectly valid (imho) title has been changed to something which is basically meaningless with out the context.

Here's a recent one from memory:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492781

The originally supplied title was something similar to: "My afternoon with a serial killer". It was changed to the "Center of the Universe" title.

Clicking a link titled "Center of the Universe" one would rationally think they were about to read something by an astronomer regarding the latest hubble deep space image.

[tlrobinson]

I would prefer simply prefixing such simple titles with the missing context, e.x.

    PHP Blog: A New Beginning

[3825]

To play the devil's advocate, we already have the URL so the title (at least directly on https://news.ycombinator.com, experience on hn-android and other clients will vary):

    A New Beginning (us.php.net) 

Is that not good enough?

[noonespecial]

The biggest problem with this is the unavoidable editorializing. Its as likely to become

   PHP project takes awful turn, elects incompetent new leader.

[melvinmt]

Well, doesn't the domain affix (php.net) provide the context?

[pbreit]

I think that's very potentially worse. "Changing direction" is far too opinionated.

[anon1385]

>This would be clearer if we didn't let submitters enter a title-- if our software simply let people submit urls, and retrieved the title from the page. We don't do this because it's too inflexible. Some articles have titles that are too long. In others the subtitle makes a better title.

The problem is you've created a horrible half way house. There is a class of submissions that only make sense or attract interest with a custom title. These generally get reverted to some meaningless title which then prompts a lot of pointless discussion about the title change. If you don't have the man power to review custom titles, and don't trust the community to do it then disallow them other than in the case of manually editing down titles that are too long. It means missing out on a certain class of submissions, but those are mostly a mess these days anyway because they get filled with people talking about the automatic title change and people confused about why the link was submitted and upvoted.

[tptacek]

The problem is that they have a simple policy that makes total sense based on their principles (first person to post a story doesn't have special privileges, and posts are community property) and their limitations (part time admins).

Unfortunately, that policy engages with an issue that nerds can debate endlessly --- which title is better? What constitutes editorializing? Are original author titles the optimal titles? Oh, look, there's that word "optimal" --- let's spend seventeen weeks debating it!

Therefore, it seems like there's something for us to discuss. But there really isn't a discussion to be had here. People who want titles to be managed should start their own HN alternatives. We could use more of them. Or, even simpler: if you have a story with a bad title and a new title you feel strongly about, instead of submitting and then writing a long comment, write a blog post about the story and submit that instead.

Of course, those two suggestions are much less fun to talk about than a debate about titling stories.

[jamesaguilar]

> a horrible half way house

Horrible might be a little strong. "Mildly confusing," or, "suboptimal in certain respects" are more accurate.

[coffeemug]

I find people who vehemently debate relatively esoteric HN policies like title changes a little odd. In order to function, every ship needs a captain. PG is the captain of this particular ship. If you don't like a policy, you can suggest an improvement and see if he decides if it's worthwhile to make a change. The HN people are always very responsive and thoughtful, so you can't fault them for ignoring their users or making ad-hoc decisions. If you happen not to like the decisions of the captain of this particular ship, you're always welcome to get off at the next port. It's pretty simple, so I really don't understand where the complaints are coming from.

[mixmax]

The easy way to solve this problem would be to add a sub-title field on the submission page. For many submission it could be left blank, but for the ones where the submitter wants to draw attention to something special or non-obvious, like a bug in the submitted page, he could fill out the sub-title.

[studentrob]

Agree, this comes down to trust. Trust trust trust. If you don't have infinite time for moderating, paul, open it up to others. In fact I'd love to see a system where people can also vote on titles. Most people (aside from the OP and submitters) hate sensationalized titles and would vote up a better one. I guess Reddit kind of does this by allowing multiple submissions of the same link, but you still get a lot of garbage titles voted up anyway, and by the time the submission makes it to the front page, the title is fixed.

[misuba]

Make a blog post with your custom title, link to the article you were going to submit, add your commentary even more fully, submit your blog post.

[slowdown]

I expect you to be shadow banned without reason in 3..2..1...

:D

[macspoofing]

It just isn't that big of a deal. Either way.

[bambax]

> Titles are common property. The person who happens to submit something first shouldn't thereby get the right to choose the title for everyone else.

This is a strange statement.

To me, a submitter is an editor, not a robot stumbling on an interesting article by pure chance. As an editor, the submitter makes a decision about when to submit a link (the time of day matter a lot), and, yes, about how to present the link.

Every day there are posts that make it to the front page, thanks to an interesting spin in the title, and when suddenly the title gets reverted to the plain original version we wonder what this is doing on the front page.

It's also strange to state that what users complain about in an ongoing fashion, is "not that big a deal".

Anyway, there would be a simple solution to this: when the title is changed by moderators, save the submitter's title, and show both versions (one under the other, one smaller than the other).

I wrote a little script that does just that (it saves every new submission, and then when called on the page, checks if the title changed and if yes, adds the original title as a subtitle); it worked fine until HN switched to https.

I'll re-release it as a browser extension soon if anyone's interested.

[001sky]

To me, a submitter is an editor

To be fair to PG, this is not his view. His view is also not unreasonable. By delegating editing to the publishers, he provides a defence against PRs astroturfing HN. So, he is able to kill two birds: lower overhead and higher signal to noise.

The obvious problem is the edge case, where the original title is hopelessly too general (although perhaps was accurate in the context it was originally published). Along with the other edge cases (obviously false/misleading or flamebait). The latter are subject to moderation (per his note above).

The "out of context/overly general" situation is the grey area, with no easy fix. It seems a smaller price to pay than the having PRs editorialize every post (option 1) or people blog-spamming externally modified links (option 2).

[danmaz74]

It's also worth noting that when the submitter-editor finds a title that is more significant than the original one, a title that allows some interesting content not to get drowned in the "new" page, does a service to the community.

[pain]

So important to show versions of edits. Instead of having to argue about which version, we can read every version together and think it out for ourselves.

[anigbrowl]

We do sometimes change titles from the original when the original title is egregious linkbait

Indeed, but the guidelines (as they currently stand) do ask people to edit both linkbait and titles with gratuitous information (like 10 amazing ways to get your blog post featured on Hacker News). Granted, people will sometimes editorialize (injecting their opinion into titles) or put outright incorrect information in titles, but we already have a good flagging mechanism to deal with this, not to mention people's ability to comment on title abuse.

The problem is that a lot of worthy articles are given shitty titles by publishers - the title of an article is very often not what an author intended, but what an editor decided would draw more eyeballs. This is particularly a problem for science articles, where the article deals with some interesting but typically slightly obscure discovery, but the title is pure linkbait. For example, some weeks back I submitted a post about the rather surprising discovery of polypropolene on one of Saturn's moons by a NASA probe; the title on the article was 'common household plastic found in space' which makes it sound like someone had accidentally dumped a bunch of spoons out of the ISS (and which led to the top comment being a moan about the crappy title, calling me out for not changing it - in fact I had, but the mods had reverted it). The web is awash in linkbaity titles, and they tend to be either misleading or to obscure the aspect of the news that's 'of interest to hackers.'

I think the policy should be to trust members. If some HN users persistently editorialize or supply misleading titles, then they'll be flagged and lose credibility or get banned, dependent on how deliberate and egregious their title abuse. Members who submit informative titles will correspondingly be promoted. The karma/user identity system functions perfectly adequately in this respect. I agree that moderators ought to focus on moderating discussion (and reducing the prevalence of mean or stupid comments); reverting titles seems like a pointless distraction from that task.

[jellicle]

Yep. There are two separate problems: original titles created with an overly-high amount of concern for people clicking through (linkbait) and original titles created with an overly-low amount of concern for people clicking through (interesting personal blog posts titled "some stuff", for example).

Both of these should be changed to solid, standard news titles that inform the potential reader about the content.

Letting people change titles eliminates both of these problems, at the occasional expense of a crappy title being submitted and promptly flagged down. Graham's solution is worse than the problem it purports to solve.

[S4M]

> I think the policy should be to trust members. If some HN users persistently editorialize or supply misleading titles, then they'll be flagged and lose credibility or get banned, dependent on how deliberate and egregious their title abuse. Members who submit informative titles will correspondingly be promoted. The karma/user identity system functions perfectly adequately in this respect. I agree that moderators ought to focus on moderating discussion (and reducing the prevalence of mean or stupid comments); reverting titles seems like a pointless distraction from that task.

How about introducing a karma threshold above which you are allowed to chose the title for the links you submit?

[j_baker]

You know, it seems like the solution here is to be able to distinguish the original title and the submitter's commentary about the title. To borrow from another comment in this post, something like:

    A new beginning

...could become:

    A new beginning (PHP elects new leader)

It's tempting to say "Titles shouldn't include commentary", but I think that there are valid times where the submitter should submit commentary. Otherwise, we just end up rewarding people for duplicating the same content with a more linkbaity title. You can imagine a techcrunch article that just quotes the original, but has the title "PHP Implodes as Leader Steps Down".

[trendspotter]

I really like your idea. I suggest that HN shows the original title first and in a second "sub-headline" in italic letters the "commentary" headline by the submitter. Like:

   A new beginning
                                          
   *PHP elects new leader*                         
                 
                                                                
                                

After thinking about it, here is a even better solution:

Let titles allow to be flagged by the community. Example below:

  submission X by kdzsb 22 minutes ago | flag title | flag discussion | 9 comments

Moderators would simply edit flagged bad titles. Rather than having them to watch all titles (old rules) or no titles at all (new rules).

[lowboy]

I like this, if there was some way of visually distinguishing submitter addition (make it lighter, italic, etc) so we know if a parenthetical is from the site or from the submitter.

[lmm]

> The only way we can tell if a newly created title is accurate is to read the article, and we're not about to read every article submitted to HN. The only option is to revert to the original title, which is at least what the author intended.

So do it automatically then. It's ridiculous to say "we can't do this automatically because that would be too inflexible... so we'll get human moderators to blindly follow a process without thinking instead".

What happens now is that users put a lot of thought into a good title for the page they're submitting, and then a mod comes along and just trashes it. It should not be surprising that this upsets people.

[clarkmoody]

One of the most helpful title additions is the (YEAR), for older articles. This gives nice context for the reader, before clicking the article.

[001sky]

Yes, an obvious cue for something that is not news, but may be interesting seems wholly appreciate. I think HN is pretty good about this in general for articles not in the current calendar year. Such a modification is not editorializing or biasing the content in anyway, too. So this keeps a consistency in place on that front.

[comex]

The thing is that even if the original title is what "the author intended" on a blog where (a) it will usually be accompanied by some or all of the text and (b) context about who the author is is evident from the rest of the site, in my opinion many of them are essentially meaningless out of context - anecdotally, especially for more personal posts where a descriptive title or anything that seems like SEO might seem too formal. When posts are modified to these titles on the HN front page, readers are left to click either due to domain recognition (which isn't always there) or mere curiosity, without a clue what they'll find at the link. This is unfair, since the post may be highly interesting yet has to compete with many other posts with better titles. Not that big a deal, but when you're actively going out reverting titles of popular posts, IMHO, it would be better to add some basic context if easily available.

[lifeformed]

Why not just mention that on the submit page? I had no idea this was a rule. The submit page doesn't say anything about using the original title.

[danso]

I agree that this policy is sensible from a process standpoint. However, it does end up penalizing the writers who are bad at SEO, or just don't care...and at the same time, it rewards the sites that do cynically partake in link bait titles, all the while being little more than blogspam.

I think my problem is that when a headline is clearly too vague and someone adds a non adjectivey headline, the mods go out of their way to revert it, doing a disservice to everyone. If monitoring titles is a burden, then it seems like it'd be less work in these cases to leave the clarified titles...the community is usually good about flagging it.

Also, do HN mods revert to headline or the title tag? That is, can submitters choose from either (this is significant for most New Yorker articles, which have very short heds by properly descriptive title tags)

[_delirium]

Yeah, my main problem with the current policy is that it lowers the overall quality of content by encouraging content from places that are optimizing their titles. Some places even write titles deliberately targeted at HN. Stuff not intended to "go viral" or be marketed, but rather just to provide useful information in a non-HN context, often ends up with completely unintelligible, out-of-context titles, like "Update". But that material is often actually better.

I guess I could try to adopt a personal policy of only reading submissions that have vague, out-of-context titles, and see if it works as a kind of reverse heuristic.

[ddlatham]

The person who happens to submit something first shouldn't thereby get the right to choose the title for everyone else.

To throw another idea in to the mix of interesting ones proposed here already:

When someone submits the same URL with a different title than a previous submission, allow them to see the set of submitted titles for that submission and upvote the best title. The highest voted title (with some smoothing logic to avoid back-and-forth flips) is the visible one.

This way submitters can use better titles than the original, but instead of the first submitter determining the title it is decided by the group of submitters. It would also decrease the work for the moderators.

[eevilspock]

Many comments herein make good cases for changed titles. Titles are extremely important as they are the content of the front page, and along with rank are how we users decide what to read.

Here's a solution:

  1. Allow submitter to optionally change the title.
  2. Use the changed title, but on the comments page display
     the original title near it. 
  3. Display up/down-vote buttons next to both titles.
  4. Dynamically swap titles based on (Karma-weight?) votes.

In other words, let the community drive the moderation as it already does for other things. It's imperfect as there is still a first submitter advantage, but it will work at least 80% of the time for 20% of the complexity.

[gojomo]

Easiest solution (more eyes, no new development):

Give more people title-edit privs, but set an expected-behavior standard that to edit, you are expected to (a) read the article; and (b) emphasize informativeness over either editorial-spin or originalism. Right now the "defaulting to original is always OK" rule is encouraging attentional abuse (by both mods and readers).

Far-out solution (some development/assessment needed):

Allow alternate titles to coexist; have a separate voting tournament between them.

I understand PG's priorities, but the Scylla and Charybdis of bad-submitted-titles and bad-original-titles is wasting a lot of readers' time, and biasing followup discussions in a more ignorant and acrimonious direction. (Bad titles feed into PG's 'much higher priority' as well: they are the 'broken windows' indicating that no one is watching the store. If no one has time to help get titles right, who's going to curate the much more numerous and twisty threads?)

Great titles are an art and a gift to readers. Improving titles is a major opportunity for the social news web. Empires like Drudge and HuffPo have been built on pulling out buried ledes from elsewhere, sometimes abusively but very often to the reader's benefit. HN should be open to innovation here.

(BTW, the twitter account @HuffPoSpoilers is a thing of beauty in this space, much larger than just a joke. It takes the HuffPo interest-piquing titling the one necessary step further, removing the tease and delivering the payoff all at once. It Is The Future.)

[anigbrowl]

Right now the "defaulting to original is always OK" rule is encouraging attentional abuse [...]

Quite so, not least among publishers for whom HN is a major source of traffic (various news sources that focus heavily on SV and startups).

BTW, the twitter account @HuffPoSpoilers is a thing of beauty [...] It Is The Future.

Agreed, and thanks for drawing this to my attention. I need bots that do this sort of semantic analysis automatically for everything.

[bowlofpetunias]

Missing the point IMHO. Changing the title isn't the problem. Lack of transparency is. That's what causing the complaints and conspiracy theories.

Which BTW is also a form of being "mean" (especially when the same opaqueness is applied to harsher forms of moderation), so if the increase of mean comments is a high priority, you may want to consider setting the tone.

Anonymous moderation without transparency feels an awful lot like bullying.

HN has grown to a point where most users have no clue who "pg" is, and what his motives are for running this forum. You're the wizard behind the curtain. I don't think you're gonna solve the issues of a growing community by keeping it that way.

[Fuzzwah]

Thank you for clearing this up.

Has it been considered having a subtitle showing [previously titled: xxx] or some such when a title is edited?

Or possibly relying on a flagging feature along the lines of "misleading or editorialized title"? Rather than just changing all/most titles?

[nmcfarl]

I think these are exceptionally good ideas.

The only reason I typically care about this conversation is that a year ago or so I was tracking an article that I saw the "new" page, and it got its title changed to something insanely literal like "Post #4". Which of course tanked it's chance of getting off the new page and me learning anything about the topic.

Either of your suggestions would have solved this problem.

[dsrguru]

Having a "flag this title" feature is the best suggestion I've seen so far. If there aren't enough moderators to read articles before reverting titles, then having the community do it makes so much more sense than doing it blindly.

This approach gives intelligent first posters the necessary flexibility to change the title for any of many valid reasons (I still can't believe your comment that they changed the title of that serial killer article, killing one of the most chillingly powerful articles of the last month), yet it prevents first posters from abusing their priority even more effectively than the current approach.

[molecule]

It would be appreciated if the moderators would make an attempt to not obscure information when choosing to modify titles, e.g.:

> The new title, "Leaving Twitter", is much less descriptive than the previous one, "Nathan Marz is leaving Twitter". Could someone please change it back?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5386284

[cbhl]

Maybe we could change the social norm on HN, rather than seek a technical solution.

Users who think that the original title is a poor fit for Hacker News can create a post on (say) their own blog with the desired title, a brief summary, and a link to the original article and context -- similar to "reblogging" on Tumblr and such sites. Then, they submit their "reblog" page to Hacker News.

If the new title is indeed more useful than the original title, the "reblogged" post should get more clicks, upvotes, and comments than the original submission, and because the "author's original title" on the reblogged post is the editorialized title, reverting to the "original title" does the right thing (in the eyes of the submitter). And if it isn't a helpful title, the link just falls off of newest like every other link that get submitted.

Thoughts?

[jack-r-abbit]

I believe people refer to this as blog spam, right? From the HN guidelines: Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

[tptacek]

This is exactly the right approach, and has the added benefit of offering the submitter an opportunity to editorialize and summarize to their heart's content without taking something unfairly from the community.

[X4]

If you're worried about title originality, why don't you write a scraper instead of asking for people to submit urls manually? Would be more efficient. But, If you care about real people posting stuff, then they should be allowed submit whatever they see appropriate. To mitigate the frustration, I think you could allow urls to be posted multiple times with a specific scientifically backed grace period of "n-hours" until no more duplicates are allowed. People can still up-vote the titles they like best and the winner takes all, making the other titles appear like collapsed sub-captions below the main-title. Hope you understand what I mean. This would solve two problems at once. A) Custom title's, no censorship. B) Valuable data about winning-titles, that can be used to train a stochastic model to predict the best titles. How you use the data from B) is up to you.

I mean people aren't stupid enough to change the Title of the "Higgs Boson" to "Bananas". Sorry, if this comes over wrong. I respect you and this is just critics on your software's policies.

[lisper]

You could make everyone happy by adding a comment field to the submission form so that the submitter could add their own sub-title.

[trendspotter]

The problem with your logic is that not every URL has a meaningful title.

There are a lot of times websites that are not optimized and use titles that sometimes are as self-explanatory as "home". I have discovered news websites that don't have a title for each of their articles, even larger sites like pehub.com didn't have titles until they fixed it only some weeks ago.

So this is going to be more horrible than editorialized headlines.

After thinking about it, here is a easy solution:

In addition to discussions, allow titles to be flagged by the community. Example below:

  submission X by kdzsb 22 minutes ago | flag title | flag discussion | 9 comments

Moderators would simply edit the few flagged bad titles. Rather than having them to watch all titles (old rules) or no titles at all (new rules).