In the general case yes. But this title, without the author, is more or less the same as at least 10 articles I've already read. When everybody is chipping in their opinion, "X's opinion on Y" is a better way of mentally separating them than "Yet another opinion on Y".
A good title should:
- Be easily identified as different from others of similar topic (mine)
- Non-name-dropping (yours)
- Non-editorial (by board convention)
By (2) the original title is bad and by (1) just dropping the name is no good. Is there a title that works for all three rules?
Well, by that standard it seems that the majority of HN readers think it is great, it is currently #1 on the homepage.
If only the number of votes would be a true measure of 'greatness', then I could stop reading HN on the 'new' page. That's where the gems come by and plenty of them are lost.
Jeez, I feel like I'm talking to a wall here. I'm arguing that the reason that it has so many votes could be because his name is in the title.
I bet if you showed 200 people the article, and told 100 of them Bram wrote it, then the 100 who knew would score the article higher. Is that a good thing?
> I'm arguing that the reason that it has so many votes could be because his name is in the title.
Yes, I got that, it's just that because it is also in the domain name in this case I'd expect it to be just as high right now if the name had not been in the title.
> I bet if you showed 200 people the article, and told 100 of them Bram wrote it, then the 100 who knew would score the article higher. Is that a good thing?
No, it isn't. But that would mean that you'd also have to drop the domain name from behind the title.
Personally I don't mind, it helps me to avoid some of the more overexposed sites here.
I don't mind the domain name... it's not nearly the size of the title, and it's not the very first words I see for any particular post. I expect it has less effect, and this article would have less votes if that's the only thing that identified the writer.
The same is true for comments... the author is included, but the username isn't given the same weight as the comment itself. And I think that's a good thing... we should keep it that way for comments and for articles.
To be fair, I also use the domain somewhat, though I use it more on Reddit to avoid sites like Alternet. The domain helps me avoid sites, but I don't think it has as much effect in helping me affirm sites.
If the article was great, then it would be disambiguated by votes!