Comment by emil-lp
6 hours ago
Thank you for your service, dang. You do a great job keeping HN a great site. I disagree with your decision regarding changing the title, though. Yes, it's tongue-in-cheek, but I wouldn't call it bait.
I wonder how HN anno 1968 would have moderated "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". *
* Amusing side note: Dijkstra's submitted title was actually "A Case Against the Goto Statement" but the editor editorialized it.
As I read or rather hear it, "The A in AGI stands for Ads" has two things qualifying it as linkbait in the HN sense. One is snark, the other is the mammoth meme ("AGI"). Both those things stick to the Big Ball of Mud that rolls chaotically over most of the internet.
The objection here isn't to wit, it's to predictability. I'm not sure what the equivalent of internet snark was in 1968, but I doubt that "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" embodied it.
Of course, interpretations differ. No two people would agree on all these classifications, including me and tomhow. The important point isn't that we always make the correct call (we don't, plus there's no such thing as the correct call), but that we try to the principles from the guidelines, even though doing so involves interpretation and is therefore uneven.
On the bright side, it means that objections to titles and/or title edits, always good for firing up an HN thread, will always be with us!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8770124 (Dec 2014)