Hacker News Reader

Comment by Elessar | Hacker News Reader

What a dishonest title. An update from an Mobile Phone provider included spyware purposely put there by said provider. This has very little to do with the "BlackBerry update".

I know that this is how media gets its hits, by phrasing their articles in such ways to draw your attention. So yes, use those creative juices and come with suspenseful one-liners.

But I despise intentional attempts to mislead.

View on HN

HN is an experiment. As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening. http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

How can a site as large as HN motivate people to avoid repeating linkbait titles? If you submit a toned-down, but more accurate title, it often falls quietly off the New page... I don't see a solution.

Post interesting articles? If they're any good, you won't have to change the title.

Sure, this is the approach I try to take.

But there are chaff articles that get more attention than I (personally, yes it's subjective) think they deserve, because the title is flashier than it could/should be. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be rewarded by the group dynamic. With a smaller community, people will learn to deprecate a 'flashy' submitter's titles but that can't really happen in a community as large as this one's. I think it's an interesting problem.

edit, here's a recent example I participated in:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=704348

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=704664

The flashy dupe got 19 points, vs. 8 for a deeper bunch of information I posted in response. I'm not saying this because I care about the discrepancy on a personal level -- it's just an easy-to-recall example of what I'm talking about, because I participated in it. In fact, in this case, hey, maybe people want the quick fix: "Ooh! Graphene! Cool!" Upvote, and move on.

But this verges on falling in this category:

The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting. Gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter. (http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

That's a simplistic view of crowd behavior. Greatest common denominator link bait headlines will outperform interesting articles as the audience gets larger.

It is an accurate title. It IS a BlackBerry update with spyware included - it's just not an update from RIM.

I disagree. The title makes it sound as if this is an issue that will apply to all Blackberry users, not just those of a service provider in a specific country on the other side of the world

If an update of "system software" from Dell for Windows installations included Dell spyware, would you title the article "Windows update bursting with spyware" or "Dell software update bursting with spyware"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com