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"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"

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

Submitted title was "Rio Tinto blew up 46,000-year-old Aboriginal caves in Western Australia (2020)"




Exactly, the original title was misleading PR speak [1] focused on Rio Tinto's bullshit apology instead of the magnitude of the site that they destroyed.

Odd to see such dogmatic reverence for pg's rule to the extent that you actively remove the key information which drives interest in a post initially.

How does condemning titles to bland, irrelevant, uninteresting "original" statements fit with on-topic posts meant to be "anything that good hackers would find interesting"?

1. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html


Actually I agree that PR speak counts as misleading and can be a valid reason for changing such titles: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... I don't think I agree with your case about this one.

If you really want to understand HN's approach to titles, I can explain more, but I'd like to be sure first that you aren't just trying to pick a fight about it, since that's boring and never works.

One short, partial answer is that in practice, the kind of thing people do when they're trying to make titles less "bland, irrelevant, uninteresting" is actually to make them more provocative and baity, which is not at all the same thing as what the HN guidelines mean by "interesting". Provocation and curiosity not only aren't the same, they may even be disjoint states.




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