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Comment by fdsary | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible for mods to make title less linkbaity? Even if the target's title is.

Every time someone complains on HN about "linkbait" I wonder if said article would have been discovered if a more pedestrian title had been used.

"How dare the author pique my interest with his verbal chicanery! A pox on thee!"

Could you suggest an alternate from the body of the article? How about this:

Article text: "$10 million that he has personally invested in the Big History Project" -> "Bill Gates personally invests $10 million in Big History Project"

Article text: "Barr allowed the Big History Project to replace World History, which is known as Global Studies in New York, as a required course." -> "Big History replaces World History in Brooklyn high school"

Why does it matter?

I'm not who you're responding to, but in general I think it's a good thing when the article title gives you an idea of its content.

I poke fun at the OP in my comment (as of right now) above, but to more seriously discuss what I brought up (would literal titles render quality content less discovered) but I have seen title changes on HN that made me glad I read the article before the title had been changed otherwise I would have missed it.

Edit: to further expand, there have also been articles I click through to with "linkbait" titles, that ended up being poorly written or not what I thought they were going to be about. I close them after a couple of paragraphs (and don't feel cheated or tricked). Were I on another community I might be more wary of links to crap but since HN tends to skew more towards quality stuff I'd rather let the "linkbait" if enough of the community thought it was good enough to get it to the front page. I get suitably more discriminating when browsing the New section.

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