Comment by mvdtnz
1 year ago
I wrote a program that tracked the changes in story titles on Hacker News a while ago. Some of them were really quite strange. I can't understand some of the policies, like why the words "How" and "Why" are stripped from the front of titles (eg "How I rewrote my app" would be changed to "I rewrote my app"). Some very small proportion of the title changes could definitely have been construed as politically motivated but overwhelmingly they were benign.
did you write up your findings anywhere? I'd love to read about them!
I didn't, mainly because the findings were so mundane! I still have the data, so perhaps I will some day.