It’s a tough call. Many forums have a rule against changing the title at all. People posting are often used to this and post the title as is from the article. The idea being to help prevent editorializing and clickbait on the part of the poster. Every headline these days though seems to be some variation of blatant clickbait or so and so “slams” this or “destroys” that. At this point I probably trust randos on the internet to make headlines more than publishers.
It’s a tough call. Many forums have a rule against changing the title at all.
Those forums are wrong. A title should accurately reflect the content. We can’t choose the title other websites choose… but we can choose a title for our posts and we should take advantage of that.
Also - if you find yourself posting on a forum with that rule, just ignore it. And then tell them the title you typed out yourself was copy/pasted. They’ll have no way of knowing since so many news services A/B test titles anyway.
Here’s the tile I would’ve used: “Police Alert Parents to iPhone’s Automatic Contact Sharing Feature” — I think we can agree it’s more accurate than the deliberately unclear title this post currently has.
Those rules exist because so many topics are so politically or socially loaded that allowing everyone to edit them to what they see fit creates an incoherent mess and provokes arguments.
It’s a tough call. Many forums have a rule against changing the title at all. People posting are often used to this and post the title as is from the article. The idea being to help prevent editorializing and clickbait on the part of the poster. Every headline these days though seems to be some variation of blatant clickbait or so and so “slams” this or “destroys” that. At this point I probably trust randos on the internet to make headlines more than publishers.
Those forums are wrong. A title should accurately reflect the content. We can’t choose the title other websites choose… but we can choose a title for our posts and we should take advantage of that.
Also - if you find yourself posting on a forum with that rule, just ignore it. And then tell them the title you typed out yourself was copy/pasted. They’ll have no way of knowing since so many news services A/B test titles anyway.
Here’s the tile I would’ve used: “Police Alert Parents to iPhone’s Automatic Contact Sharing Feature” — I think we can agree it’s more accurate than the deliberately unclear title this post currently has.
Those rules exist because so many topics are so politically or socially loaded that allowing everyone to edit them to what they see fit creates an incoherent mess and provokes arguments.
Jup, hence my request to change it… the editorializing shows OP’s bias too usually so I never minded it a lot…