Why did the title change? It used to be the same as the original article, but now it's been needlessly editorialized to be kinder to amazon. Seriously? What the fuck. That's not HN's job, and is a disservice to the article, and the community.
The user "dang" posted further down in the comments saying that he changed it because the title was "over the top", which didn't seem like a good reason to me (but then again, I'm not a moderator). I can understand the desire to avoid sensationalism, especially if the belief is that this anger over third party Alexa skills is only about the problem in the article. In reality, though, this is just one of many issues that currently has the community up in arms, so I don't think the original title was as hyperbolic as they believed...
But you might be right. I've been on HN for 3+ years and i've never seen anything like this happen before. This is clearly an abuse of power and is not in any way an act on the behalf of the community.
To whoever changed the title of this: I hope Amazon is paying you a lot of money (under the theory that it's somehow better to be willfully corrupt than just stupid).
HN may strive to provide intellectually superior content, but that doesn't make me any less susceptible to linkbait.
For one, I appreciate some effort to prevent the front page of HN from devolving into 30 completely unedited, but completely unhelpful titles. If I wanted that, I would just read ads.
linkbait is, at least to me, more along the lines of "you'll never believe what these developers made" and this post is nothing of the sort.
> Do authors have no say in what they call their piece?
Absolutely. No one is asking smashcompany.com to change their title. But this isn't smashcompany.com either.
I think there's a lot more "editorializing" going on by inserting an implicit excuse into the title, that wasn't asked for and wasn't needed.
I am _not_ glad to see the title change, as it goes against the stated rule of titles matching the title of the submitted content and is blatant editorializing that is supposedly verboten on HN. It's ridiculous and unwelcome from my perspective. Especially since it's a multi-billion dollar company involved who can certainly deal with some mild criticism.
The point of a linkbait title is to elicit an emotional response that is disproportionately strong compared to that of the actual content. As such, they are worded strongly.
I agree that "relatively new" was a bad emendation. I probably just would have removed "absolutely" from the original title and left it at that.
Removing emotional context doesn't make a story more "objective". If someone wrote a story like "russia invades china", and the story got edited to "russia parks some tanks in the capital of china", clearly even though both stories are "accurate", the second one has actually lost information.
"There's a reason why the article is scant on the details of the rejection"
Did you click through the link to the page where the developers were discussing the certification process on the Amazon developer forum? This is the link the article above:
https://forums.developer.amazon.com/forums/thread.jspa?messa...
This seems as detailed as you will find for a critique of an app store.
And additionally, both of those developers linked to their own blog posts where they offered still more details:
http://www.derpgroup.com/blog/on-the-topic-of-certification
http://ocean-of-storms.com/tsatsatzu/explaining-amazons-indi...
You say the final paragraph is the "icing on the cake". The final paragraph is a summary of what Joseph Jaquinta suggested in his longer post. The above linked blog post would be redundant if it simply copy-and-pasted everything that developers had written over at the Amazon developer forums. Like any blog post, it was written with the assumption that some people would click through the links to see the source material.
Emotion is great. I want to understand other people's emotions, which means titles should express them if they are present. It's for precisely that reason that I appreciate tamping down "over the top" linkbait, if that's what this is.
Understanding others' emotions gets hard if everything is a life-threatening emergency†. It's like watching CNN during their worst years: every possible event got a "BREAKING NEWS" banner. It made it hard to stratify emergencies. If every title devolves into "THE INTERNET IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE because git just went to v2.8" HN would become useless to read.
† I'm not saying that's what this article is doing, just making an example.
Linkbait: "You won't believe the disgusting thing this A-list star did in public!"
Non-linkbait version: "Tom Cruise accidentally stepped in dog poo."
The first is linkbait because it teases you to learn who the star is and what was the disgusting act (which was actually quite boring).
--
Linkbait: "This company sucks at app stores!"
Non-linkbait: "Amazon sucks at app stores!"
The first is linkbait because it forces you to click to learn which company it's talking about. It would most likely make the reader think it's about Apple, or maybe Google Play Store, both of which are probably more interesting than Amazon's store. The second title is NOT linkbait because even though it's inflammatory, it conveys enough information to let the reader decide whether it's worth a click. The reader immediately knows:
* It's about Amazon app store.
* It's going to be very negative.
If the HN reader is interested in how Amazon's app store is doing and how users are reacting, then it will stand out as a link worth clicking. If the HN reader doesn't care for an opinion about amazon's store, or doesn't want to read a strongly-worded one, they'll pass. There was no baiting at all.
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I argue that the editorializing of the article created MORE of a problem, because it wiped away an important piece of information for HN readers: that this is a strongly-worded negative review. The edited title ("Amazon is relatively new..") conveys no information about the article. Frankly, it now sounds like a very dumb article.
dang is here as a moderator precisely "on behalf of the community." As in, he acts to facilitate productive discussion. You might disagree with his decision here, but I can't see any way in which he has different goals than you would want him to. At worst, he has made a mistake, and the backlash from it will make him not do it again. (At best, he is being "the hero we need" by attempting to stop a flamewar argument before it starts, even if that means taking the heat that that flamewar would have spawned entirely himself.)
As happenstance would have it, though, it was MY skill that got rejected that started the forum thread that he pulled quotes from. If you are actually interested in more details, I can provide them, but the point wasn't really about my specific rejection - it was that this has been an ongoing and growing pattern recently across the entire development community. These issues are well documented and individually enumerated (so as to not just be anecdotal, per your concern) on the Amazon developer forums, if that is what you're looking for.
Regardless, the title may be emotionally driven, but it is not sensationalist. They (the Alexa team) literally do not have a good understanding of how to run this app store. I think the context missing here is that we don't mean that in the sense of "we're angry because our opinion does not match Amazon's". We mean that in the sense that we (and every time I say "we" here I mean the Alexa developer community) has had to hand hold the Alexa team into doing even the most basic things just to get the skill "store" where it is now, because it has not been a focus of theirs.
We're always happy to change a title again if someone can suggest a better one: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
Edit: Ok, since people feel so strongly about this, let's restore the original title minus the high-octane "absolutely". If I hadn't been in a rush earlier today I probably would have settled on that in the first place, but not every day can be a ponder these things deeply day.
Everyone should realize, though, that indignant denunciations are not in the spirit of this site and don't belong in titles here. They are a form of linkbait because, unfortunately, indignation always sells—mechanically and for reasons that have nothing to do with the intellectual curiosity that this site is supposed to be for. Upvotes due to indignation are reflexive; what we want HN to be is reflective. This isn't a matter of taste but of core values. To change that about HN would destroy it, so we're not going to.
I'm more interested in the frankly absurd notion that there is this software giant who is supposedly super good at web services, yet is incapable of doing the simplest possible things to sustain its development community. It's an incredible dichotomy - the Mighty Amazon of Prime Now Shipping vs. the Meek Amazon of "How Do We Certify Like Apple?" - but it's one that needs to go away.
My point was that it doesn't, any more than a waiter asking after your mother's health when she's just died implies the restaurant is on a decline. That's not insensitive (therefore implying the restaurant is now hiring insensitive people); it's just a faux pas (therefore implying the restaurant is hiring regular ol' fallible humans.) The change to the article title here, likewise, was not an abuse; it was just an overly-hasty application of the regular HN guidelines—the thing dang does literally all day without anyone noticing when he's doing it well, done with slightly less care than usual.
dang is a regular person; regular people realize when they do things other people don't like, and then stop doing those things. Systems composed of regular people (i.e. not tyrants and sycophants) self-correct, rather than entering downward spirals. Not everything presages the end of an era. Most things, where conscientious people are involved, are just hiccups.
I appreciate you for pondering on these things! Goodness knows I wouldn't want to moderate this place.