Item — HN Reader

Meta: This post is yet another victim of the HN verbatim title rule despite the verbatim title making little sense as one of many headlines on a news page.

How is "Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression" followed by the minuscule low-contrast grey "(archlinux.org)" better than "Arch Linux now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression" like it was when I originally read this a few hours ago?

8 comments

Saying it's "yet another victim" seems slightly too emotive to me.

If people can't read the source site's domain after the headline then I agree there wouldn't be much context, but equally, if they can't read that, surely their best solution is to adjust the zoom level in the browser.

It's clear you won't get complete context from the headline list plus domain, but a hint of it is provided and if you want more you click the link. Maybe I'm being a little uncharitable but I don't see a big problem here.

Even using the source domain isn't informative enough. The alternative headline is better. You are being too charitable to an inferior title.

"archlinux.org" is less informative than "Arch Linux"?

I'm sympathetic to disliking the change, but that's taking it to an extreme.

With this title, I thought it was a post advocating the usage of Zstandard or vanting its technical merits, and that it was posted on archlinux.org.

When you take out information, don't expect people to have the correct guess.

Archlinux: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package...

should be allowed. But I'm not sure that it is.

I just woke up to this and was surprised the title was eddied as well. I looked up the guidelines and it looks like I violated the "If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link." guideline.

In your defense, the only reason I knew about this being Arch is because I got the email first last night. The belief that "everyone reads the domain in light grey parens on the right" is false, as a reader I 100% ignore that information subconsciously. This article would be a lot better if it started with "ArchLinux: ...." as it apparently used to be last night. This is a 100% bad title edit, "guidelines" be damned - it made your article submission worse not better.

Yes, this is a real problem, verbatim titles are often far from the "optimal" title. In some cases the original title provides almost no information about the content.

The question is what's better than a strict "no editorialization" rule.

The exact guideline is "If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link", and I think that wording speaks from an outdated mindset where every submission is a standalone web page that _has_ a title, for one thing. This submission is a web page with its own title, of course, but that makes it sound like the guideline hasn't been rethought in too-long of a time.

For a contrived example of how dated the guideline seems, what if somebody submitted a tweet thread criticizing Twitter the company with a headline/sitebit like "Twitter now banning third-party clients. (twitter.com)". Would it have to be renamed to "Now banning third-party clients. (twitter.com)"? That would make it appear to be a more official statement instead of an unsponsored opinion.

I'm picking on Twitter out of recent memory of this submission of mine a couple weeks ago, where the submission title "Tracking down the true origin of a font used in many games and shareware titles" was 100% my own editorializing for lack of title-worthy material in the linked tweet itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667238

> The exact guideline is "If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link", and I think that wording speaks from an outdated mindset where every submission is a standalone web page that _has_ a title, for one thing.

I suspect the original intent of the rule was to get rid of pointless redundancy in the title. "The 10 craziest things you don't know about X - clickbait.com" is the sort of thing you see very often in the <title> element, but it adds no new information. Actually, you'll notice even Hacker News posts have " | Hacker News" appended to them.

In an article about Arch Linux, the text "Arch Linux" is much less likely to be redundant than an article about something else that just happens to be on the archlinux.org domain.

The window title of the submission is "Arch Linux - News: Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression". There is no need to invent a new title.

Hn rules are to be ignored. It's _hacker_ news.

Guessing such a rule helps in duplicate submissions detection. But, that should be possible from checking the URL.

Unless one uses a link shortener. Are shorteners permitted on HN?

Nope. Some sources, such as Medium embed viewer-dependent identifiers in the url which can confound de-duping based on URL alone. I don't know if 'dang et al have figured out a way to handle these cases.

Most of the text on the front page is that size and that color of gray.

If it's not easy to read, then the problem is between the css and your screen. Not the title rules.

I'm talking about the difference in size and contrast between the actual headline and the trailing HN sitebit "(archlinux.org)". The final size they end up on my screen is irrelevant to my point, because my point is about the size and contrast difference _between_ the two, whatever final sizes those might happen to be. The default HN stylesheet calls for 10pt and 8pt for those, respectively, so it's not like I'm just making this up. I'm saying the verbatim title rule is a poor fit here because it took a relevant (central, even!) part of the headline and moved it to a spot of secondary importance and size. There are cases where I defend the rule, but right now I am talking about this case and only this case :)

So even if the url got bumped to 12pt, you'd complain if the rest was 15? I think that's weird.

As long as it's on the same line as the title and easily legible, I really don't see a problem.

And it's not a spot of secondary importance. If it was still in the title, making it longer, the spot where you see the url would have title in it.

FWIW 12 vs 15pt text used like this is called visual hierarchy (or typographic hierarchy if the differences are limited to typography, they're not here, there's also positional difference between the titles and domains).

Desaturating and down-sizing suggests the information is not important, but in this case is critical to understanding and of equal weight and so should probably have the same visual hierarchy, that's easily achieved by including "Arch Linux" in the title.

I'm glad it's not a problem for you. It is for me, though, and the point of accessibility is to enable use by everyone.

You don't get to declare that something is an accessibility problem just because you don't like it, though.

You would rate the exact same formatting good or bad based entirely on whether the text next to it is a couple pixels larger. That does not sound like "accessibility".

Whether it's hard to read is an accessibility issue. But that's not your complaint.

I'm happy to agree to disagree. Please forgive me if I am (hopefully!) just misreading the tone of these comments, but this exchange has seemed tiringly mean-spirited and argumentative to me. I'm not trying to convince you of some objective fault in HN's design, just sharing my experience to see if anyone else's is similar. My experiences will still be my reality even if the answer to that question is "no" :)

I got snarky because you said "I'm glad it's not a problem for you" when I never said the current design wasn't a problem. I read that as unwarrantedly dismissive!

I'm not disagreeing with your experience, I'm just disagreeing with part of the way you want to fix it.

I have to agree with the previous poster. Sometimes i have absolutely no clue what the article is about because the original title has been edited and the url is not immediately recognizable.

> Sometimes i have absolutely no clue what the article is about because the original title has been edited and the url is not immediately recognizable.

Yes, that happens... but I'm not sure how it applies to this specific case? The URL is the same two words that were removed from the title.

I'm not defending HN's title edits in general.