Hacker News Title Edit Tracker
Web and SaaS
news edit tracker
SHOW HN2019
How HN took it
8 positive, 16 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 2 critical, out of 26 comments about the project. Thread score +0.21.
Idea: 6 for, 0 againstDesign: 2 for, 0 againstExecution: 0 for, 2 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Useful transparency into moderation and title edits.
From 3 comments
This is great! Transparency, accountability, predictability etc should be more prevalent in the web.
julienreszka on HNThis shows how much work goes into moderation here. Almost all titles seem more accurate and less clickbaity.
yellow_lead on HNThis is really cool! It'd be great to have a tool that tracks all editing/curation/censorship on hacker news.
Kinnard on HN
Shows that most title edits improve accuracy.
From 2 comments
This shows how much work goes into moderation here. Almost all titles seem more accurate and less clickbaity.
yellow_lead on HNI am very thankful for this policy. The HN titles are essentially always better and more honest representations of the article contents. Keep up the good work!
bonoboTP on HN
Objections
Some edits remove useful specifics or make titles less informative.
From 2 comments
Some of these edits seem really questionable when laid out like this. Pew Research: 2.2% of Americans produce 97% of political tweets ↓ Small share of U.S. adults produce…
Karunamon on HNAny definition of "editorializing" I've ever heard involved injection of opinion - none of the above did that (and in a couple of cases, the title reversions went from a…
Karunamon on HN
Title edits make it hard to tell whether an article was already read.
From 1 comment
One thing I dislike about title edits, even when it is for the better, is that it makes it hard to know if you already have read the article. Popular topics often get multiple…
tjoff on HN
Requests
Show the submission domain alongside titles.
From 2 comments
I'd love to see the domain added to the end of these, like they are on HN itself. For example, one might wonder why NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit is shorted to CUDA Toolkit... unless you…
ocdtrekkie on HN> cloudflare.com is right next to the title > mozilla.org is right next to the title Hmm... hey, petercooper, perhaps you should consider including the submission website in the…
Wowfunhappy on HN
Track URL changes as well as titles.
From 2 comments
Cool! Since you have the infrastructure already, it would be neat to track URL changes as well. Probably less frequent, but I bet they happen at least daily (e.g. if a submission…
paulgb on HNThis is great! I have a feature request: One thing that worries me about HN is that I've had a _link_ changed by a moderator in the past. And I don't mean removing query junk or…
kevlar1818 on HN
Lengthen the list of edits shown.
From 1 comment
That is such a great UI. I feel like the list should be longer. Can you do that without it costing more? Not all of those edits are by mods, of course. Some are made by…
dang on HN
Questions
What is the rule for title editing on HN?
From 2 comments
What is the rule for titles being edited? Is it just no editoralization in the titles?
iamwil on HNMost of these edits seem to be to make the title match the title of the article instead of being editoralized. From the guidelines: "Please don't do things to make titles stand…
zamadatix on HN
Is the scraper code being released?
From 1 comment
Any plans to release the code? Which scraper? Chrome headless?
sarosh on HN
Alternatives named
HNtitles browser extension shows original titles.
From 1 comment
I just posted a very similar thing implemented as a browser extension (HNtitles[0]) so that it shows the original text in the page without any effort for the user. (I had written…
bambax on HN
NewsSniffer tracks changes to news articles.
From 1 comment
Someone I know runs something like this for news content. See https://www.newssniffer.co.uk/
petercooper on HN