43
votes
Suggestion: As a general guideline, posts relevant only to one country should have that in the title i.e "Your voting data has been exposed" vs "USA voting data exposed"""
If you want to make the site diverse then people need to stop writing as though the audience is one country. Obviously it doesn't count if they're posting in a geographically relevant group eg. ~news.usa
This is what tags are for.
If your post involves one or more countries, add those countries as tags: "usa", "australia", "china", and so on,. This not only tells people what countries the post is relevant to, but it also gives people the ability to search for posts about a particular country, filter for posts about a country, and even filter out posts about a country.
In addition to tagging, I think a headline like "Your voting data..." is poorly written and clickbaity. Better would be "X million voter records exposed" and a tag of usa or whatever.
Hacker News does a good job of this, both modifying headlines as well as updating links to point to a better / more authoritative source if available.
That's just a fictional headline the OP made up for the purpose of this discussion. I've very rarely seen a headline like this in real life (maybe I just don't read the right news sites!).
We need to be wary of encouraging people to rewrite headlines too freely. That can lead to editorialising and even more click-bait behaviour. Rewriting headlines is a delicate process which should be done only rarely and very carefully.
I'm not sure I can disagree with this more strongly. A big strength of Tildes is that it doesn't have the same incentive structure as a normal media site. Clickbait works, content producers who gain funding through views will engineer their headlines for clickbait or die in the market.
It's possible re-writing headlines should be gated behind a fairly high trust score but I think the norm should be re-writing any headline you think doesn't accurately reflect the article. HN's rate of doing this works well for me but then HN doesn't concern it's self with very clickbait friendly topics.
I'm more hoping that we can have headlines which help decide if the article is worth reading. I don't have time to read everything.
I would prefer that some basic standards be put in place on the use of tags in the communities where this is relevant, rather than encouraging people to butcher titles.
Doing otherwise either results in titles being changed (as in the example above) or lots of pseudo tags [USA][Politics][Serious] being added to things (often very inconsistently), making the titles a pain to actually parse.
"Your voting data has been exposed" is expressed in the passive voice, and so is "USA voting data [has been] exposed". "Has been exposed" is passive. In both cases, the data didn't do anything: it was done to. Something else did something to the data. The data itself was passive. Both these headlines are expressed in the passive voice.
"XYZ Pty Ltd exposed your voting data" is expressed in the active voice. XYZ did something. It was active.
This is just a friendly reminder to include that info as either the first comment on the post, in the post title, OR as a tag on the post itself