We often remove names from titles, because HN works better when the focus is on content rather than personalities.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

A nice fix would be if github.com/username could appear to the right of the title instead of just github.com. That's on our list, but not implemented yet.

But in this case, isn't a large percentage of the content predicated on the person generating the content?

For sure, but how much that's a good thing vs. a bad thing is not so clear. This is one of those cases (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280) where it's useful to have exactly one thing you're optimizing for. It helps you know what to do in situations that would otherwise be head-scratchers, and the consequences are often surprising yet rather easy to derive.

On HN, the one thing we're optimizing for is intellectual curiosity. That's merely one kind of curiosity and by no means the most powerful. Interest in personalities, especially celebrities or the infamous, tends to be fuelled by one of the higher-octane varieties—call it social curiosity. There's nothing wrong with social curiosity. It's human. But intellectual curiosities are smaller fish than that, and on HN we need to do things to prevent the bigger fish from eating them all up. Everything in our bag of moderation tricks is there to help with that.

I remember an email thread with you some years ago where I was complaining about someone/thing and you not only responded to the problem brilliantly but also smacked me deservedly for my part in letting the problem exist.

Your optimisation approach seems to me to be working out nicely.

Hopefully I've learned to be less smacky in the meantime!

Admirable values.

The new title (EDIT: "Issue: find a new home for repos") seems pretty generic to me, though. If I didn't open the story while it had the old title I would have probably missed it.

Edit note: At the time of writing, the article title did not include "Requests".

You're right, but from our perspective that's a feature not a bug. This story isn't lacking for attention. In cases of hot controversy, it's good to add a little resistance to the circuit. When a title doesn't immediately give away its meaning, it takes a bit more energy to 'overcome'. That energy needs to come from curiosity ("I wonder what that is?"), which is the circuitry we're hoping to activate here. Compare that feeling to "ooh, new development in hot topic X!" which is how one feels when a headline grabs attention and links it directly to something already charged in the mind. It may be a subtle difference, but these tiny initial conditions seem to have the largest effect on how a thread develops. This is related to the principle that on HN, it's good for users to have to work a little. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

But the content is specifically that repos by a notable maintainer are seeking new maintainers, not just random GitHub repos.

The most notable repo involved is "requests", an HTTP library more widely used than the one in Python's standard library (I'm under the impression it has become bundled with the Python standard install but am unable to find a citation for that).

How about changing the title too "Python requests library and other repos seeking new home"?

Ok, I've tacked Requests on above. That goes against my gut feeling about this, but let's try it and see.

for what it's worth, it made the title feel more deliberately chosen.

i'd generally expect titles to be close to the original title of the post. and the first version of the title just doesn't feel like a title that anyone would put onto a post, let alone an issue report in a tracker. with 'requests' added it feels more real and interesting.

Well, it was the title of the original article, and therefore the title that the site guidelines say we should use: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." It was neither misleading or linkbait, which is why I don't feel good about having changed it. But that's fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

oh, i missed that. in that case i agree, the original should have been good enough. can't fix everything...

edit: i was thinking of this title "Issue: find a new home for repos" which is not the original one. somehow that "all" makes a difference, as does adding "request"

This story is meaningless without the person's name. Kenneth Reitz owns the #1 most-used Python package, `requests`.

Sure, but not every title needs to give away the meaning of a story. It can be frustrating when it doesn't because we're so conditioned to expect that—but interrupting such conditioning is part of the point of HN. We want something more than subsecond reflexes to be at work here.

If people encounter a title that doesn't fully yield to 300ms of parsing, that causes irritation, which is a good thing. Not good in itself—irritation is a bit painful—but good because it causes the rapid-reflexive subsystem to throw an error and pass control to the slower, reflective system that is able to process more information. That's the system we actually want to get activated. One's it's engaged there's a chance that it will remain engaged, which—this is the hypothesis anyway—will lead to higher-quality thoughts and comments. That's why I say it's good for HN users to have to work a little.

But it isn't giving away the "meaning" of the story - it's giving critical context that makes the story a story and not just some random "John Doe" on Github throwing away their personal projects to new maintainers.

I'd argue that if random John Doe is giving away their projects and that is on HN's front page, it's actually the better story. Then there's a bit of a puzzle: why? Why did people upvote this? What's interesting about it? And you have to work a little to find out. It excites curiosity, and if it doesn't, nothing will happen. That's a better starting point for HN than "new development in a hot story". Hotness and curiosity are at odds with one another.

i didn't recognize the name so it would not have made a difference for me, but having this posted on HN hinted that this is significant, and not some random little used projects.

I don't know how to distinguish that from

"You won't believe who's giving a way a repo

#2 will shock you"

Titles like that try to generate the same effect as hot-topicness by relying on gimmicky language. They activate the same reflexive responses as I described above—they just do it by form rather than content. That's even worse of course. At least with a genuine hot topic there's a feeling of satisfaction when you find out what the latest development is. It's like watching the next episode of a popular series. But titles that have only bait and no content are like feeling that anticipation, only to be tricked into watching another commercial. That works for getting views, but everyone hates it and has an icky feeling afterwards, and over time it builds up a strong residue of resentment.

That kind of title operates even less by intellectual curiosity than the kind I was talking above, so it's even worse for HN. They are the kind we edit and everyone agrees with the edit.

Without any mention of the person or specific repos, I for a split second thought that this article was about Github shutting down and all repos needing a new home lol

Ok, I've taken the word "all" out of the title above.