I think our policy on editorialized titles should add a small exception. This post above was renamed from The Hated One, Proton, and the Ethics of Sponsorships to Proton Offered Me Money… Then It Got Weird which I think is indeed an improvement if we want the discussion to center around the linked video and not the OP’s opinion of it, but especially with clickbait titles from YouTubers the title can be a bit strange in that it’s unclear who is saying it.
I would say we should prefix more opinionated titles with the name of the author/publisher, so for example the topic above should actually be renamed to:
The Hated One: Proton Offered Me Money… Then It Got Weird
I’ve done this a few times with other YouTube videos in the past:
But for YouTube videos in particular if the domain is just youtu.be then it remains unclear that the forum post title = the title of the video. And sometimes people don’t properly paste the link in the title before posting so the featured domain doesn’t show up at all.
Anyone opposed to this change or should we do this going forward?
To clarify, you’re saying editing the post to add the YouTube link directly (so the title is properly linked) or simply changing the name of the title to the YouTube video title (with the title not directly linked)?
If there is only one link and news story I will be posting, I directly paste the link in the title and have that be the name of the post. I only “edit” to make sure the entire title is visible if the platform cuts it off when the title is long.
I’m saying if the title itself is a strong opinion or personal statement then we’d add the name of the person who wrote the title to the front of it. So we would add “The Hated One:” in front of Proton Offered Me Money… Then It Got Weird in this case.
So, if one posts a video of another creator; it would be the name of the creator/channel and then the name of the video. This way it’s always clear what it is.
Now I understand. So yes, I am agreeing with you and not opposed to the change.
Sounds like a great idea to clarify the titles of videos with the source in front.
And to make it simple and consistent for the moderators, a rule you could adhere to is that the name of the channel/poster is what gets added verbatim.
Personally, I think any external link should have the source in the title whether its an article, video, or whatever. It makes it more obvious then just the small domain and it will make it easy to search by sources.
I agree with this rule, but what about when the point of a post is not the story but the author’s commentary on the story? If I include the article I am commenting on, must I always change the post title to match the articles?
The titles of articles and videos are often changed. If the title of the linked media is also the title for a post, should the post also be updated? Or do we stick with the title at the time of posting?
Is that maybe an argument to instead write a more descriptive title, like @PurpleDime originally did, or Dearrow does for thumbnails and titles in Freetube?
Very much agree with this one, meanwhile what happens if the user updates the title of the video?
Happens quite often with bigger channels that try to get a bigger reach etc.
Yes generally, just to not be annoying with edits (they send a notification to various people). If the new title is much better for some reason I wouldn’t have an issue with changing it either though.
This is exactly why we would use this same format though, because these titles are a specific person making a statement. If the post title isn’t a personal statement then we probably don’t need to include the publisher name at all, same as we currently do.
Yeah, it’s a good point, but the intent of this rule in the first place is to not weigh the OP’s commentary higher than everyone else’s commentary here. If something outside this forum is being discussed we wanted to make sure everyone looked at that thing themselves before commenting.
In an ideal world whenever we are discussing something outside this community the first post and thread title would be as neutral as possible, and the author would be welcome to leave whatever commentary they’d like in the first reply to the thread. Imagine how traditional link aggregators like Reddit/HN work basically.
But just for the sake of brevity/convenience we still do allow all that commentary to be included in the OP instead of the first reply. It’s still generally expected that the title is neutral and the link is at the top of the post instead of the bottom.
