were actually edited to the current version quite recently, after an earlier discussion of this issue. The current guideline language is, among other details about titles,
"
. . . .
"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
That plainly says that original titles are preferred.
The guidelines also say, "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter." So blogspam is plainly disfavored. Personally, I think that it is a rare blog that has many posts worth submitting here, and I'm always on the lookout for better sources from which to submit articles.
By the way, as a rhetorical matter, I'm surprised after reading through all the other comments before posting mine that I don't see a lot of examples of before-and-after titles to see if the submitters who don't like the curators preserving original article titles (or shortening original article titles in a way different from the submitter) are really coming up with titles that are much better than the original article titles. What are the most important recent examples you have in mind?
My own experience on HN is that when I see a cool article from a good source, and I submit it with the original, professionally crafted title, I sometimes submit an article that was earlier submitted by someone else, and sank into oblivion because it was retitled in some way that made the article look dumb. Few participants on HN have much professional experience in headline writing, and I'd rather have most submissions be submitted with their original titles based on my observations. (If you have convincing counterexamples, that is examples of HN-user-made titles that were really good and more helpful than original article titles, I'd be glad to consider those examples.)
I have two examples where I'm of the opinion my title was clearly better suited for HN.
Goodwill Hunting (http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.nl/2012/11/goodwill-hunti...) which I changed to something like "An investment bankers take on the Autonomy take over. This blog is well written and I've read every post on it but in most cases the subject of a post will only become clear when reading the post. Thus it is a bad title for use on a news aggregator.
GNU Typist (http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/) which I changed to "GNU Typist: Universal typing tutor" which is a variation on the first sentence of the page. My title clearly describes what one can expect, is not overly long or linkbaity.
Interested in the opinion of other HN'ers on my edits.
If we're going to be limited to the title of the original piece why not enforce this, in the code? Fetching the page and parsing out a title tag really shouldn't be too many LOC - and would stop the debate.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
were actually edited to the current version quite recently, after an earlier discussion of this issue. The current guideline language is, among other details about titles,
" . . . .
"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
That plainly says that original titles are preferred.
The guidelines also say, "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter." So blogspam is plainly disfavored. Personally, I think that it is a rare blog that has many posts worth submitting here, and I'm always on the lookout for better sources from which to submit articles.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624933
By the way, as a rhetorical matter, I'm surprised after reading through all the other comments before posting mine that I don't see a lot of examples of before-and-after titles to see if the submitters who don't like the curators preserving original article titles (or shortening original article titles in a way different from the submitter) are really coming up with titles that are much better than the original article titles. What are the most important recent examples you have in mind?
My own experience on HN is that when I see a cool article from a good source, and I submit it with the original, professionally crafted title, I sometimes submit an article that was earlier submitted by someone else, and sank into oblivion because it was retitled in some way that made the article look dumb. Few participants on HN have much professional experience in headline writing, and I'd rather have most submissions be submitted with their original titles based on my observations. (If you have convincing counterexamples, that is examples of HN-user-made titles that were really good and more helpful than original article titles, I'd be glad to consider those examples.)