HACKER Q&A
📣 Aachen

Should the word "secret" in a submission generate a warning?


There are definitely legitimate uses for saying that an article is about some secret or other, but in keeping with the guidelines, I was wondering if such a notice could guide people to pick a more informative title for their submission. Not a hard reject, just a reminder while typing/pasting

> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For reference, what's being submitted with that word: https://hn.algolia.com/?prefix=false&query=secret&sort=byDate&type=story

  👤 gus_massa Accepted Answer ✓
If you see some post with a very bad title, you may send an email to dang hn@ycombinator.com and he may (or not) change it. It's a manual process, so try to use it only for very bad cases.

There are many, but I only found three with a weird use of "secret":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42031300 "The Secret Document That Transformed China (npr.org)" Perhaps a more descriptive title may be better. I don't have a good alternative. The recommendation is to pick a sentence from the article, the subtitle if possible, but not cherrypick the most shocking part. This article looks interesting an I don't remember a similar post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42022938 "Icy moon of Uranus may have once hid watery secret (space.com)" I'd just drop "secret", but the title is not so bad and I've seen similar posts, so I'd ignore it to save dang a few keystrokes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41982036 "The Secret School for the Best Founders (generalist.com)" I'd add "Avra:" and drop "best". (As a general rule I like to drop "best".)

Do you have 2 or 3 bad examples?