Although I may agree with the premise in the article, I'm sick of this meme like quality of HN headlines. Must we parrot popular, sensationalist headlines to get a point across? The purpose of these articles is to stir up enough controversy to get to the front page of HN.
I agree, but the point is, since school, you learn that headlines are focused to capture people attention. I'm not a journalist, but it appears to be one of the most important things in an article. (It's like advertising, you take the worst case of people's attention.)
Maybe if the HN (edit) title was as you suggested, it wouldn't make the homepage.
That's why anti-editorializing rules on HN submission titles are so important. That's why picking a good headline for the article is important. That's (another reason) why I believe that most of the news services are doing a disservice to humanity. We read many more headlines than full articles, and every sensationalistic title that is inaccurate, or a lie if taken out of context, might be another untrue information we learn.
That's not even the case. The point of headlines is to attract readers to the comment section on facebook, reddit, twitter, HN, etc. Some small percentage of people who have become engaged in the discussion seeded by the title then click through and provide a bit of ad revenue.
To be honest, I slightly prefer HN's system of using the article's actual headline, as this demonstrates that HN is not trying to impose its opinion on articles.
The complaint about uninformative headlines should really be directed at the source article's editor.
Your second point is valid, and even your first point, but I do try to be honest in the choosing the headline. It's the original headline, with "The Big Picture:" added at the beginning and in this case there's plenty of pictures on the Big Picture page that don't necessarily represent a "bust."
It seems that, if I accept your first point, I also have to accept that HN is becoming more sensationalistic, and I (and I suspect, others), are unhappy about that.
I totally agree. But in absence of that, I think tweaking headlines or adding parenthesized descriptions is good form, despite being against current HN policy.
I think on HN this has always been a trend. a headline sparks more headlines of similar stories regardless of date. I've seen it happen quite frequently.
I'm not going to get into the subjectivity of what is or is not "sinister", but there's a more fundamental issue with the pattern you've described. Increasingly often today headlines are defacto articles. They get shared on various social media outlets and then people start discussing the title, filling in the body themselves. When the title is 'fake', it leads to mass disinformation. This gets even worse when the title and lead paragraph say one thing and it's only later in the article that the more nuanced reality is revealed. In that case you not only mislead the 'titlers' but also the skimmers.
I imagine readers on HN actually read articles at a vastly higher rate than e.g. Reddit or Facebook, yet on reading the comments it often becomes quickly apparent that many users, even here, do not bother reading articles before commenting on them. In an ideal world I wouldn't mind seeing misleading headlines put in the same bucket as false or misleading advertising. Of course in practice that'd be a terrible idea since this rule would simply be used for the powers that be to litigate against anything they don't like being published.
This headline is sensationalistic beyond the pale of respectable journalism, and certainly beyond that of HN. The article does nothing to justify the title. Speculating ways in which Twitter might eventually lose to a new competitor does not license you say they've already been "mortally wounded".
To the extent that anyone reading this has the authority to change headlines (I only know for sure that pg does), could you please modify it to something reasonable? Thanks.
For others, please note that improving headlines is not only permitted, but very much precedented and generally encouraged. Bad headlines let shitty articles get upvoted, and degrade the overall quality of HN. (With some sources, namely Popular Science, I'd even humbly suggest changing the headlines be mandatory.)
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