We're already talking about a case where users think that they're smarter than the guidelines, and are choosing to ignore the guideline to use the original title.

Between submitting retitled blog spam with commentary and editorializing the title of the original source, I believe the former is a lesser evil.

Users can upvote the original source when it is submitted with the original title, while the blog spam falls off of newest. (In the unlikely case that the blog spam has a better title, it will get upvotes as you'd normally expect.)

Right now, this editorializing of titles puts a lot of burden on the moderators, and I think that any solution to this issue that we come up with that has to deal with the finite bandwidth of those moderators.

hey why not have 2 titles, original and secondary... Moderators would simply identify and delete bad secondary titles and prevent redditization...example:

A Farewell --- Android head quits

So, I continue to read tptacek's comment to mean "here is something legitimate you can do", not "here's something else you shouldn't do"; if it is the latter, as you are stating, I'm not certain why it was brought up in the first place.

Regardless, I take issue with your contention and seemingly fundamental assumption that the article's original title is somehow better and will win out against alternative titles. The entire reason people get angry about this is that the alternative titles are often much more useful: they are more precise, and they are even sometimes less sensationalized.

Sometimes titles just need to be different when the material is being viewed in a different context. I've actually been chewed out before for "editorializing the title" when I wrote the original article in a case where my original didn't even have a title because the medium (Google+) doesn't use them. In other cases, the in-context title might need to be very short, but on Hacker News it should be longer.

The places you thereby see users actually complaining about this policy are not the places where the submitted title sucked. To demonstrate just how dismissive it is to claim that that is the situation we are discussing: it's like trying to end a debate on whether airport security should strip search anyone who talks about security issues because clearly everyone who does so is a dangerous terrorist.

In fact, even people (such as myself) who complain about title changes made on Hacker News often call for title changes, as to many of us the problem is "inaccuracy", not "originality": if the title says something that doesn't seem to be true (as in the case just yesterday regarding the Tesla S's usage of rare earth metals) it isn't the person submitting the link that is "editorializing", it is the original author.

Another interesting circumstance was one of the original cases from about a year ago that made this turn into a big public argument: the visualization on the New York Times about some non-hacker aspect of politics. The visualization was insanely impressive, and someone wanted to submit the visualization. The title was clear, factual, and even quite concise: it just labeled the page as being a visualization.

In this case, there were tons of interesting comments about the visualization, and people were really excited to see it: the link was clearly a success, it was voted to the front page, and not a single person was bothered that it was there... until some moderator changed the title to the original title of the visualization, which was about some political issue, and now the comments changed in tone.

Now, people were arguing about how this wasn't worthy of being on Hacker News: that political issues should be discussed elsewhere; then a fight breaks out about the underlying politics. People are infuriated that somehow this link ended up on the front page with an insane number of votes, and no one has any context due to the policy of changing the titles of posts, even after many hours of discussion in hundreds of comments, without any historical notice that it happened.

This is the kind of situation that I think it is reasonable to be bothered by; sure, there are some people who believe that the titles should never be changed under any circumstance, and to the extent to which they exist it is convenient to lump them together with everyone else because "well, people editorialize and there's linkbait so the titles should be changed QED"; but that's not the argument that I've actually seen about title changes: people just want more nuance and more transparency.

I'm trying to acknowledge that a strict interpretation of the guidelines would lead one to conclude that tptacek's suggestion is "something else you shouldn't do", since it would be "blog spam". I also think that a well-informed title and comment giving context for the original source should be "something legitimate you can do" if it provided good value above and beyond the original source itself.

I can totally see someone submitting a HN page talking about the visualization in the NYT to some meta-HN. (I was going to remark about reddit.com submissions, but most of the top ones seem to be submissions where reddit.com was the original source.)

I suspect that "more transparency" won't happen if it results in more work for the moderators; I'd vastly prefer solutions which are self-reinforcing and can come about by the community working together within the existing framework of HN.

A lot of the value of "more transparency" just comes from "if the title is changed, make certain the old title is also visible from the comments page, so people don't freak out". One time someone submitted a link to a YouTube video of a panel discussion involving Linus Torvalds where he explicitly gave NVIDIA both the finger and the F-word. The link was a link directly to the paragraph in the video where it happened, and the title was clear that that is what was being linked.

Upvoted to the front page, holding there for hours, people were having a discussion about the appropriateness of swearing in this context, the extent to which it was a joke, and about how NVIDIA has treated the Linux community. And, of course, then the title changed: it got reverted to something like "Random Panel from Random Conference".

Now, everyone was really confused: the comments were all concentrating on this one moment in an hour long video (linked to semi-directly, but still like 30 seconds after the link), and freaking out about how people were so uptight and shouldn't be concentrating on that, and that there was all of this other content there.

When the title changes, it drastically changes the character of the discussion: while this website is also a link aggregator, I know of very few people who believe that that is its value; instead, people like Hacker News because of the comments: it is a discussion forum. You can't just change the title of the discussion forum while people are actively discussing things without causing a catastrophic situation.

This is thereby what I mean by "transparency": I don't mean a moderator spending even an extra 30 seconds explaining "why" something happened... I just mean that the site needs to make it clear that something did happen, or these massive arguments break out and a bunch of people are left unhappy and angry. As long as title changes are going to happen to discussion threads that already have hundreds of comments, you at least need to have a boolean "title changed" notice.

That aside, the "nuance" aspect (which I think is even more important than the "transparency" part, as you might just decide "old posts should never have their title changed" and the transparency is less important) would probably require more time from the moderators. I am not certain how to get around that: I think moderation fundamentally requires nuance.

edited my comment

There just need to be enough watchdogs.

A very simple solution would be that titles can 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).

> Yes, more power to the community. Wikipedia is still alive despite its massive openness. There just need to be enough trusted watchdogs.

Wikipedia has enormous meta community, and it's likely that such a huge amount of meta is toxic.

Minor point: flag discussion should probably be flag submission. The current flag action is more for flagging a submission not suitable for HN rather than flagging the discussion around it. Those two things are different.

Yes, that is minor but still important. Having 3 options: flag submission and flag discussion and flag title might be too much.

That's up to the admins to decide what needs more often to be managed, the submission or the discussion. Or it could be named:

    flag title | flag submission/discussion