Dang and other HN staff have said before that they like making readers have to work a bit for the information, and not just be spoonfed in the headlines. I understand it to be about fostering curiosity and wonder. I assume it's also about discouraging people from dismissing an article based on headline alone. ("Kerbal Space Program? I don't know what that is and don't care about it"). Really great HN articles are often an unexpected discovery on a topic I didn't expect to be as interesting as it was.
Dan could probably explain better than I. I don't have any information about whether this title was changed or why, but the current title strikes me as lining up with that approach. See also "I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words."
> I understand it to be about fostering curiosity and wonder. I assume it's also about discouraging people from dismissing an article based on headline alone.
Quite an euphemistic way to say "clickbait", isn't it?
You've said clickbait titles are against the rules in the past. What is your definition of a clickbait title, if it's not something vague and provocative that requires users to click through to figure out what the topic is?
(Note that I am talking purely about titles, not the articles behind them.)
Definitions are beyond me, but in this case I don't call it clickbait because it's the title given by the author to a text written from the heart, not to hoodwink or waylay. That makes it content, not bait tacked on later.
There's no need for every title to spell everything out. On the contrary, it serves reflection for readers to work a little, and 'reflective' (as opposed to 'reflexive') is the quality we most want here.
And in this case the title is written from the heart in the context of reddit, where it has "/r/KerbalSpaceProgram" automatically attached.
I cannot agree with categorizing the act of naming the company/brand as "spelling everything out". You have to work equally hard to understand this title with or without the name. It requires reading the post and putting in the same amount of mental effort. But the stripped-down version fails to serve the purpose of setting context. It might as well be a random ID.
The posts you linked both have titles that at least set context, whether or not some people wanted more information.
Now it's _just_ "There's no easy way to say this"
Request granted, eh?