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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Submitted title was "Office 365 implementing AI to detect employees colluding, leaving and more". That broke the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The proper place to include that sort of interpretation is by adding it in a comment in the thread. Then your interpretation is on a level playing field with everyone else's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Also, a comment gives you room to actually substantiate your interpretation.

On the other hand, a thread like this probably wouldn't have gotten attention without the sensational title in the first place, so this kind of submission is a borderline case and at worst a venial sin. (We still change the title once it does make the frontpage though.)

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I know it's policy to use original titles, but the editorialization in this case hardly seems sensational. Just look at the linked roadmap tickets:

* https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter...

The title "Microsoft Purview: Additional classifiers for Communication Compliance (preview)" sounds like nothing at all. It doesn't seem like exaggerating to say that the reality is literally Big Brother in a corporate context. Seems like your changing the title is just going to have the effect of reducing attention given to something that really needs to be exposed in clear terms.

I agree, but there's a big difference between such a title on /newest and the same title near the top of the front page. In the former case, it's a reason to skip over it; in the latter, it's a reason to dig further, and digging further is what HN is all about.

I'm not saying the current title is the perfect outcome—I'm just not sure what the perfect outcome is. I do think that in this case, the dystopian title adds to the quality of the post (but only once it's on the front page).

It's impossible to cover the general case with a simple rule. Even a paragraph of rules wouldn't be enough—people would discover corner case after corner case and you'd eventually need a book. I think HN's guideline covers the domain as well as any single sentence could; and then we can cover all the exceptions ad hoc, and talk about them in the comments.

It sounds 200% like newspeak and it’s pretty obvious what will be inside the egg.

> I know it's policy to use original titles, but the editorialization in this case hardly seems sensational.

It's interesting that the HackerNews guideline makes no statement about whether a custom headline is sensational or reasonable. It is: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." They probably have a slightly different reason for this rule than many people first imagine. And that reflects in the actual wording of the rule being slightly different than many people would first phrase it themselves.

Yeah, the point of the HN rule isn’t to prevent drawing attention to the post - it’s to put your comment on it at the same level as everyone else’s.

There's quite a bit of overlap between 'linkbait' and 'sensational', so I'd say that concept is in there.

If you want to make an overarching statement via the post title, the route is to write up your thoughts on the matter, title your post however you want, and then post that.

OK, I will so in future.

I tried to summarize the article in the title. Will follow the guidelines from now on.

Thanks for the clarification about this sort of catch 22. I had been wondering about this exact scenario that seems to happen fairly regularly.

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