14
votes
Untitled
I've been noticing a lot of initial comments nitpicking titles lately. I'm not sure how to improve this, but I believe these posts are generally low effort and negative. Of course if a title is outright incorrect or misleading, it should be pointed out. But where's the line?
Anyone else notice this? Thoughts? Suggestions?
I think most of those comments tend to be good as long as they elaborate and actually add substance to the comments.
i.e.
"Misleading title, X is actually doing this and that"
Can't say I've noticed it to an absurd degree. Sometimes I do see people calling out headlines because they appear more charged than the article they contain, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It helps keep us accountable in a world where people usually only read headlines.
For titles that are genuinely poor, high rep users will eventually be able to edit them.
I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
Maybe not absurd, but noticeably more for me. For a few articles, they especially stand out to me because there's more discussion regarding the title than the article itself, which seems unbalanced.
I finished up the ability for me to edit titles (and have it logged properly in the Topic Log) last night, so I can start fixing some of them when it comes up now.
I think overall, we'd probably want comments about the submission itself (title, tags, whether there's a better source, etc.) to be separated out somehow. Possibly with the comment-tagging system, those comments could be tagged either "offtopic" or a separate "meta" tag?
What's your opinion on titles that may seem sensationalized to some, even if that's the title of the original article? I don't want to ask explicitly in regards to my post in ~news yesterday, but it did generate mostly comments on semantics and resulted in a removed comment. It got me thinking today about whether titles ought to be editorialized, especially on charged topics like politics.
Ah yeah, that's a good example. It definitely wasn't your fault in any way since that's the title of the linked article, but I do think they sensationalized it. "Crisis actor" is a term that usually applies in pretty specific situations that don't really fit that story unless you twist the meaning quite a bit.
Personally, I think maybe it would have been reasonable to re-title it slightly to something like "President Trump Suggests Asylum-Seekers Have Been Coached" since that seems to be more accurate. What do you think?
Well, my feeling are definitely mixed on this.
When I was in the Air Force, I'd volunteered to be a Crisis Actor for training purposes on more than one occasion. So on that point, I'm very familiar with what the term is supposed to mean. Conversely, the term has been co-opted by very far-right sources (e.g. Breitbart, InfoWars) to dismiss human suffering as fake, and that it's all an act to further a political agenda. Sandy Hook is a good example of this usage of crisis actor. Because of this, the term now has a loaded political meaning that elicits an air of conspiracy surrounding human suffering.
So to address your question, and at the risk of getting overly political here, the President often makes statements in-line with stories these sources publish, and has previously appeared on InfoWars. When he suggests that these migrants aren't really in fear of their lives, that their crisis is an act, it echoes the same sentiment. The quote from his CNN speech seems to imply a doubt on his part that the fear these people express for their lives may not be genuine. The headline as published satisfies the nuance of the implication, when taking into account the far-right co-option of the term crisis actor, and the subsequent doubt of real suffering. Calling it coaching instead wouldn't necessarily be inaccurate, but it does lose a lot of the complex nuances of the modern environment of American political discourse.
IMO, the over-focus on semantics was detrimental to the content, but I also think changing that specific term would be a distinction without much difference, except to exclude a lot of the complexities.
tl;dr - I dunno.
Very interesting info, thanks. Certainly a good example of why it's so difficult to decide exactly when something is "too sensationalized".
This opens the door to posters editorialising their own submissions - and, based on my experience moderating one particular subreddit, that can lead to toxic discussions triggered by the poster's opinion about the news rather than about the news itself ("The stupid Prime Minister did X today. When do we get to vote this fuckwit out?"). We basically had to lock that down and tell everyone they have to use the article's title, word for word, with no personal editorialising. If they wanted to opine about their article, they had to do it in the comments like everyone else.
Yeah, and I know that there are quite a few subreddits that have the same rule, for basically the same reason. However, I think a lot of that comes from the fact that titles are uneditable on reddit, and the only thing you can do after something is posted is remove it and get them to totally re-submit from scratch, which is terrible for a lot of reasons.
"You must use the exact title from the article" is probably the simplest way to try and minimize the number of editorialized titles that you will end up needing to remove (assuming the sources write reasonable titles, anyway). But if the title's editable, I think there's more leeway. That way, if the title's editorialized, someone else can fix it. If that person abuses the editing ability to add editorialization, you can take it away from them.
There's a possibility of different issues with "edit wars" and such, but I do think that overall it will add some possibilities for changing titles to be more accurate (which could be good, since a lot of sites sensationalize their titles).
That was going through my mind as I read your explanation about editing titles. Because the one person you can't reasonably remove editing ability from is the poster themself. No matter what other people might decide to write as a more reasonable title, the poster is always going to end up having the final say.
I wish people would avoid comments that are solely critical of the post, whether it is the title, the source, or the ~ it's posted in. It does not foster thoughtful, substantive discussion - it creates an environment of pedantry and nitpicking. If you have nothing to add outside of the criticism, maybe it's best to just say nothing and let the post fade into obscurity. If you have to do it, at least try to find something of substance to discuss.
I think it's always going to happen, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. The quality of the original post shapes the discussion a lot, between the title, the specific article/source that was posted, and a few other factors.
I do think that (like I mentioned above) it would be ideal if we could easily filter out the "meta" discussion though so that people don't have to sort through all of it when they just want to read the discussion on the actual topic. Especially when it's something like "this link should be changed to the actual source", and all those comments linger around even after the change has been made and they've become completely irrelevant.
When people are making posts to ~news that are not actual news articles (in one case it was a text post with no link, just the OP expressing their opinion on something), then I think it's perfectly reasonable to call that out in the comments, especially since we don't have a reporting system yet.
I agree with you. I pointed out a title was misleading earlier and it snowballed into almost knit picking and I felt bad. I didn't mean to turn the conversation into that. But how do we avoid that? All I did was comment saying, "Title is a bit misleading, this is what the article says." just to kind of give people an idea what the article was about. How could I have avoided the snowball effect it had? I re-read it and all I could think of was, if it had been handled outside the comment section. SO maybe if / when we have mods it can be handled more so by reporting. But there is a fine line and it is hard to determine, what is knit picking and what isn't.
It was actually what happen with your comment (and another similar thing that happened yesterday) that got me posting this. And for the record, I think what you said was perfectly reasonable and fine. It was the snowballing that surprised me.
I love your title!