Too many HN threads just seem to be people arguing about the appropriateness of the title. The article addresses a significant and interesting issue that's going to have major negative effects on business models, as well as some positive effect on space junk. I think they did a decent job, at least for an article intended for the general public, and I'm glad I read it. And yes, the word "plummet" is an exaggeration. But that isn't a big deal.
Misleading headlines are a constant act of sabotage on our ability to prioritize our information intake. I don't know if it really needs to be discussed every single time, but it is important enough to be recognized and discussed, and until we decide to get serious about rebelling or whatever, well, who's going to decide where the exact appropriate place is to discuss it? So basically as long as it keeps hurting, were going to keep talking about it whenever and wherever it hurts.
It's clickbait. I appreciate people pointing out clickbait. I think a lot of others do as well; it's why they read the comments on an article before the look at the article.
Had the story been titled "Solar Weather Causes Unexpected Satellite Orbit Decay" or some other non-clickbait thing I'd have read it without looking at comments first. I'm actually interested in solar weather due to its impact on radio. Too bad publishers don't understand that clickbait titles are a serious turn off. Apparently everything must be TMZ.
I don't appreciate it when the whole comment section of a substantive article is complaints about the headline. Maybe we should just have a way for people to privately message the moderators proposing a headline change to correct a misleading headine, and do that instead. Then the comment section could talk about the article instead of the headline.
I think HN's current title policy is exactly right, for this reason: submissions need "neutral" titles so that we can discuss the content instead.
In this case, the discussion of the word plummet is halfway topical: it's about understanding the severity and going more into detail of what's actually happening, putting it in context. The equivalent discussion would happen regardless of word choice.
> Too many HN threads just seem to be people arguing about the appropriateness of the title
Too many writers—including of headlines—are so sloppy with language that it's misleading, or even incorrect.
Perhaps when GPT-4 or whatever takes over those jobs, it will be better at it. Provided we don't train it on anything written after 2000 or so, when all headlines became tabloid headlines and margins got tight enough that no-one had time for careful editing anymore.
And most aerospace threads are a shitshow, people who have no idea what they are talking about getting uppity about words which are basically appropriate in this circumstance. Going from 2 km/year to 20 km/year orbit decay is indeed quite significant and could cause a satellite to be lost many years early, the last stage of which is burning up in the atmosphere which is quite plummetous.
This can bel alleviated by choosing better sources or relaxing the objections to editing titles. I agree that there are lots of useful and informative stories with shitty headlines. I personally don't mind title edits as long as they aim to be less rather than more sensational, and OP briefly notes the reason for the change.
Writing a good title is as hard as naming things in code. It's a much harder problem than it seems like it should be, with mutually exclusive interests often creating impossible situations.
With media publications, at least, it's more that they have specialists dedicated to slathering bait on the titles. That's their job and they're perfectly good at it—they just don't produce what people here would call a good title. This is an example of what Eric Evans called a "bounded context". The way I look at it, it's their job to sex up the headlines and our job (community as well as moderators!) to deflate them again. "Not in this context."
