from Hacker News

Tell HN: Sadly, my blog post's title was moderated

by timdaub on 2/1/23, 6:44 PM with 29 comments

I'm the author of a post that reached HN top #2 today with the spicy title "The AI Crowd is Mad."

A quick analysis that lead me to this title:

CTR is paramount to getting people to read your posts these days. Everybody linkbaits and so while I don't even want to dramatize my titles, this is just what everybody has to do to get a foothold in global competition. It isn't something I can change.

I had thought of a few titles before hand like: "AI is boiling our oceans," "AI is now in a Bubble" and finally "The AI Crowd is Mad."

I choose the later as it combines a mixture of touching people in their belief, behavior and belonging. "The crowd is mad," is a contrarian view to "the crowd is smart" and so those that train AI models implicitly assume it. It's a meaningful criticism that wants to tackle their presumptions. I'm really in doubt whether crowds are smart...

"The AI Crowd is Mad," is also a hint at the post's content in which I argue for the inflated expectations that investors have towards AI (and that it could be in a bubble).

I spent a significant time playing with titles to come up with "The AI Crowd is Mad" and I was proud of it. It is polemic to those that create AI, which is the audience I wanted to reach.

Sadly, though, and I don't know why, HN moderated the title into something very feeble that made the post drop off the front page (HN Guideline: "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.").

The changed title is "LLM discourse needs more nuance," which makes me disappointed and cringe. By no means does this hit the level of offensiveness that I intended. I also wasn't able to edit the post back to its original title.

I'm writing this submission to tell y'all that I don't like this. Btw. I had to wait 5 hours now to make this second submission because I'm being rate limited.

I wanted my article's title to be spicy and people to controverse over it. I think there is value in provoking a discussion over this topic.

I understand that it now might have fared better with the more moderate title. But honestly, I doubt it (we cannot know). I feel a bit helpless because I want to have control over that title on HN.

That's all I want to say.

Edit: Btw. my rate limiting will probably not allow to reasonably participate in any ensuing discussion in this post...

  • by wmf on 2/1/23, 7:28 PM

    I think ultimately HN isn't what you want/need and it's an intentional choice to not be part of the "modern" SEO/clickbait Web so it's not going to change. You're a guest in dang's house and no matter how bad you need to succeed you have to follow his rules. Yes, the rules are a tradeoff; sometimes good stuff gets lost. This is a normal part of the randomness of life.

  • by pigtailgirl on 2/1/23, 7:11 PM

    -- the title was clickbate - they changed it to not clickbate - it's in the HN guidelines - makes sense --

  • by LeoSolaris on 2/1/23, 6:55 PM

    Might be a translation error. "Mad" in the US isn't considered the opposite of smart. It is the opposite of "peaceful" or "sane". You're original title implied that AI proponents are either insane or in a rage. (Or both)

  • by Delk on 2/1/23, 8:52 PM

    For what it's worth, while I may fall into the trap of clickbait sometimes, I'd probably be just as likely to open a link to "LLM discourse needs more nuance" than I would to the original. If the original had been any more clickbaity, I'd have wanted to consciously avoid it instead.

    (IMO your original title as it stands is just more of an expression of opinion. Not the most professionally clinical of them, but not overly clickbaity either. Eye-catching titles aren't a recent invention, and not always a bad thing either. The current attention economy has just taken it too far.)

  • by hw-guy on 2/1/23, 7:41 PM

    In fact, I did skip over the post with the new title; I don't know what LLM stands for and the title did not inspire the curiousity to find out. I would definitely have read "The AI Crowd is Mad."

  • by matheist on 2/1/23, 7:35 PM

    Sounds to me like the process is working as intended. It's not by mistake.

    You might disagree with the goals, but that's how things are around here. HN is about provoking curiosity, not offense, or controversy, or spice.

    Sounds like your title is just not a good match for HN. That's not a reflection of the work you put into it, or whether your goals are worthwhile or anything like that. Just, not a good match.

  • by WallyFunk on 2/1/23, 7:04 PM

    There's a weird unknown feature in HN that allows you to edit your title after submitting it, getting rid of HN's omission of words and punctuation. Some titles have an exclamation mark that gets stripped, and you can add it back in after submitting.

  • by d23 on 2/1/23, 8:29 PM

    > By no means does this hit the level of offensiveness that I intended.

    Mission accomplished then. Sounds like a good moderation decision.

  • by trynewideas on 2/1/23, 7:30 PM

    > By no means does this hit the level of offensiveness that I intended

    lol. lmfao