Moderators of HN: please stop changing post titles

Completely agree. It bit me once: I submitted a link to a free epub book (hosted on GitHub), titled<p><pre><code> Backbone.js Fundamentals [free ebook, epub] </code></pre> (here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831954" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831954</a>)<p>it surprisingly made it to the front page (250 votes), but soon a mod changed the title to<p><pre><code> Backbone.js Fundamentals </code></pre> So, a lot of unsuspecting visitors <i>(my guess is about 25000 - my personal experience tells me most front page links get 100x visits more than their votes)</i> clicked on this link, expecting to see a web page but end up downloading a random epub. Very soon the poor guy's GitHub account was suspended temporarily due to excessive bandwidth usage.<p>I felt very bad and angry at the time.

My most upvoted comment (85 points) in my second most upvoted submission (554 points) is a complaint about exactly this. In my case they changed the title from:<p>"Lights -- impressive html5 / webgl presentation built with threejs"<p>to:<p>"Lights"<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107946" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107946</a>

This happened to a story[1] I submitted yesterday. The title that I submitted was something essentially:<p><i>Analyzing the MD5 collision in Flame (Alexander Sotirov's Summercon Slides)</i><p>I thought it was useful/informative to include Sotirov's name in order to lend credibility to the analysis. I did not link directly to the pdf, however in the spirit of the submission guidelines I thought it would be appropriate to include that the main body of the link were slides from Summercon. It was changed to:<p><i>Analyzing the MD5 collision in Flame</i><p>It is not apparent to me why the title was changed. In my opinion the changed title was less informative to the reader and the original title did not include any spin/hyperbole/offensive material. Mainly I am just curious as to why the title was changed. I think it would be helpful if the moderators would post a comment when a title was changed. This would help inform the community about when a title is changed and educate us about what is and what is not proper. In the long run I think this would help make the moderators job easier...<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4098713" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4098713</a>

Yes, yes, 1000x yes. Changing titles to remove gratuitous editorial spin is one thing... changing titles just for the sake of changing them is silly and counter-productive.

I can give an example of a title change AWAY from the original article title. I was quite puzzled by that when it happened, and I've never heard an explanation of why it happened. I heard about an article from a researcher on human genetics who was writing to other human genetics researchers on an email list. I meet many of those researchers in person in a local "journal club." The researcher was asking for responses from his colleagues about the article, and I thought the article was interesting enough to bring up here on Hacker News. My submission of the article here<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270</a><p>was under the original article title, namely "23andMe disproves its own business model." The ensuing Hacker News discussion had several commenters (who apparently had paid their hard-earned money for the services of the 23andMe company) complaining about the title, which I didn't editorialize or spin in any way. I agree that the article was controversial, but a legitimate researcher in the field thought that it was a worthwhile read, which is the only reason I submitted the article to HN. After I no longer had my edit window for the submission title, some anonymous person with title-editing power changed the title to "23andMe finds Parkinsons only 24% heritable" (which is a title that reveals considerable ignorance about human genetics, and doesn't fairly represent the content of the submitted article). As I post this, the original article is not showing up to me by following the original link, but Google's cache<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://independentsciencenews.org/news/23andme-disproves-its-own-business-model/" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...</a><p>confirms the original article title.<p>I can bear with curators here changing article titles to original article titles (or to titles that condense original article titles to less than 90 characters, which is the hard-coded length limit here), but I sure would like an explanation of what a user is to do if it's possible to submit an article with EXACTLY the original article title (my usual practice) and then have the title changed to a stupid-looking title that is still under my screen name. If curators are going to do that kind of thing, they should at least sign their edits to take accountability for them. (That is the usual practice in another online forum where I have editing powers on other people's posts, where I use this same screen name I use here. If I edit someone's submission title, an edit trail identifies that I did that.)

<i>probably caused lots of people that had already visited the link once to read it and think it was something else.</i><p>Many times have I been looking for an article I read previously and cannot find it. It's a combination of headline editing, a really poor search engine, and the way things fall off the front page mix with things that haven't hit the front page yet.

On occasion, I have experienced my submitted headlines being reverted back to the original source's obscure headline. More often than not these obscure headlines were made for a print newspaper or magazine where the lede (which HN readers can't see unless they click through) explains the story.<p>In addition, the 80-character limit sometimes makes it difficult to include the original headline for some of the more wordy publications. This forces rewriting.<p>I remember HN submissions used to allow headlines that were 90 or even 100 characters long. Why not bring back these limits?

I think, basically, the OP's request is to start distinguishing between "spins" of titles for polemical and other questionable purposes (which should be reverted), and titles that are honestly modified in order to call attention to aspects that are interesting to HN readers, but might be marginal in the original context of the article.

Yes, it's aggravating. In an ideal world there would be a comment and explanation, but since this would often end up derailing the subject of the pos into a discussion about moderation, I suggest mods just abstain from doing it or else send a note to the poster. When I rewrite the title of an article I do so with a view to making it more accessible to HN readers.

Kinda funny how no moderators have responded... makes me uncomfortable that this community seems to be arbitrarily moderated by invisible people.

Definitely agree. I have been following light table religiously and missed the <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875857" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875857</a> story because I probably saw it after the change. If a submission gets up-votes it is a sort of validation for the submitted title. Tailoring a post title to the HN community is an excellent way to bring attention to articles the community most definitely enjoys, but would otherwise miss.

I would prefer that the alternative of posting <i>either</i> a link <i>or</i> explanatory text be changed to allow <i>both</i>.<p>Often a title, original or otherwise, simply doesn't provide sufficient context to clearly explain a link. A few well-chosen words of prose could help here (more so if the text could be editied / modified while the post was sitting in queue). Gameable? Perhaps, but we can vote down / flag in that instance.<p>"Heat &#38; Thunder" was pretty non-obvious to me, and until I read the comment here about the data visualization, struck me as particularly non-interesting.

Another title change example: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121698" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121698</a><p>I submitted a link with the title: 'Linus to Nvidia: "Fuck You"', which was changed to: 'Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds'<p>My original title was much more accurate (especially since I linked to a specific part of the video).

At the very least, a comment should be automatically added logging "Title was changed from X to Y".

I agree whole-heartedly. Moderators frequently changing titles is an annoying practice. The article's links are not descriptive (they're just id numbers), so the article titles are how I mentally keep track of which submissions I want to, or don't want to, read. Changing the the title makes me have to guess if it is a new submission to hit the front page or just an old one with new clothes, so to speak.

Also couldn't agree more. It's very frustrating when this happens. Sure my browser show's the link as "Visited" but when I don't recognize the title (or more specifically it doesn't seem to be in reference to anything I've read that day) I end up opening it again. As stated sometimes the reason the article is up here is not the primary focus of the article itself.

An example of mine: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165794" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165794</a><p>The article was originally called <i>Better disagreement</i>. I chose to call my submission <i>'How to Disagree' on Steroids: DH7</i>. Someone later changed it back to the article's title.<p>You could say my title had an editorial spin (I'm looking at 'Steroids'), but I resent the edit for not even keeping the explicit reference to DH7 and PG's article.<p>I have chosen this title because I assumed most of HN knows about PG's article. This submission is essentially a rehash, and therefore <i>not</i> interesting HN material (better link to PG's article). Except for the DH7 part, which was original. By changing the title, I hoped to tell readers about that, so they don't lose time, nor stop reading before even reaching DH7.<p>I also hoped a karma boost from this submission, but the title edit (which I think was responsible for the lack of upvotes) quickly squashed that hope. Which is the <i>real</i> reason I was pissed off, I must admit. Plus, the moderators cannot take the time to ponder every fishy title. I stand by the rationalization above however: the best HN title possible certainly was not <i>Better disagreement</i>. That title was meant for LessWrong, not HN.

I had posted the recent one and after it hit the top of the first page, I received an email to not editorialize titles in HN posts, and it was changed.<p>On reflection, it was quite clearly a spin and I could have made that title much better. The mods are generally looking out for the community and trying to keep titles as representative of the as possible.

Wish they just took care of this elegantly with the already in place voting system. Let multiple links be submitted with different titles and let people vote up the one with the good title. Why let some mod with personal opinions and not enough time to know every subject and article dictate things? Let the community decide.

Is there any hard and fast rule on who gets mod privileges? Is it a karma thing or a trust thing?

I agree with this, your examples should not have been changed. I would like to see the converse -- if the title is the same as an article's but the article's title is linkbait or sensationalized I would like it to be changed to something that tells me what it's really about.

I don't want them to <i>stop</i> but just stop doing it on <i>titles that are already fine</i>. Sure, get rid of "gratuitous editorial spin" but not helpful titles that have context!<p>Pretty sad this post itself has been made dead actually.

slightly OT: I recently been killed by HN and writing an article on it: it wasn't easy to get resurrected as well as actually realized I've been dead!

Truth be told, you moderators are obsolete. I know that changing titles makes you feel like you are important. But the only thing you are really needed for is stopping spam. Stop ruining peoples post titles with your false fear of "gratuitous editorial spin".<p>You should only change titles if the title doesn't even remotely match up with the content. e.g. Title: Heat win championship / Content: Thunder win championship

Upvoted this submission, since it's important and we should talk about it.<p>At the same time, I think the title-editing as actually practiced is great. I'm pleased with the results whenever I notice the changes. (Which is usually after someone gives good reason for the changes).<p>This is perfect and in line with the reason we're allowed to edit our own submissions for a while. It's basic tweaking to make things fair and accurate, instead of link-baity and sensational.<p>I can give one personal example.<p>In hindsight (past few weeks' performance) the original title was right and I was wrong, but I complained about the title here or another story: <a href="http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3993657" rel="nofollow">http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3993657</a><p>Basically, I complained that it used the word "barely above its opening price" (or another, similar word like "barely"), which I thought unfair, since 23 cents of gains in a day is perfectly normal and if sustained would be a good trend forever.<p>The title was changed. (In hindsight, the negative title was justified, and my complaint was out of place.)<p>This is a place where we are a tight community that can do things like accuse each other of stabbing one another in the back, or stealing each others' text or ideas, or whatever. People upvote. THe story comes out. Responses are written. Soon enough we know if the original, sensational title is justified or needs to be toned down either a little or quite a bit.<p>On the whole I think the moderators do an excellent job on the titles and it serves a really important purpose. I'm not sure how to fix the other complaints mentioned here. (Maybe put a history in there for search engines or if people want to know how it was submitted).<p>I know I much prefer this to the broken titles that slashdot users had to put up with (even after complaints) back when that site still had a readership... proactive is much better here.

Or at least an explanation of what was changed and why. it would give a little more transparency to the site. And the same goes for link deletion, etc. It would be nice to know why such and such comment or submission was shelved (though some are guessable, others are not as much).

I've had this problem too. They are way too overzealous about this.

The people taking this action are in charge of how the content should be presented here. You can always vote with your feet.