Stripe records user movements on its customers' websites

Ok, we've abandoned silence in the title above. I think that's redundant anyhow.

I also took out "your". That's a standard moderation trick since second-person pronouns in titles tend also to be clickbait: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thanks! I'll be mindful of this in future submissions.

It's not redundant at all. Admit it you have updated the title because Stripe is HN's company. I don't remember anyone ever editing posts concerning Google's tracking / privacy issues, for example.

We edit titles all the time, including sensational titles about Google or anything else. This is routine. You probably wouldn't remember such edits because you probably wouldn't notice them in the first place.

We particularly edit titles that users have started complaining about: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Experience has shown that to be the way to minimize off-topic title complaints (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

The meaning of the title in this case hasn't changed. Websites don't make noises when they record things.

Edit: out of curiosity, I looked for some other cases where we took out the word 'silently'. Here are some:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678471 (changed from "~30% of Android apps silently inspect other apps installed on your smartphone")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20453115 (changed from "Apple is silently updating Macs * again* to remove Zoom's insecure software")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16715835 (changed from "Giraffes Silently Slip onto the Endangered Species List")

People have made HN title trackers over the years. My favorite is https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617016). It's not perfect because it can't distinguish what submitters did from what moderators did, doesn't know what the software changed, etc. But it gives the basic picture.

I find https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/ fascinating.

Perhaps we all have a natural unconscious bias against being "edited" ("you're not in control of me [or the OP]!!"). But seeing the edits over time in the open really makes one appreciate the moderation work. Maybe it's worth making this more official somehow (e.g., adding a footnote in the submission page or to the FAQ) - because like you say, it must surely minimize off-topic discussions as well.

Anyway, thanks for your work!

Maybe we should publish a complete log after all. Especially with the title edits, we've been doing them for so long now that they really have become routine. It's pretty much a craft at this point—a very tiny and trivial craft, with many tiny rules and heuristics. I used to mildly resent having to do it, because titles feel so, again, trivial. But eventually it dawned on me why they are such an emotional thing. There's more about this here if anyone cares:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I'd personally appreciate some way to tell right on HN that a title has been edited (or more importantly, that the original URL was altered to point to a different page... THAT is much more significant, and a bit troubling to me.) Then again, maybe title moderation works best for the community when done silently. (It'd be fair to use the word "silently" in this case, right?)

We nearly always post a comment when we change a URL: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... The most significant title edits get comments too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If we published a title log, URL changes could certainly be included.

The idea of marking every single edit, or publishing a complete moderation log, feels like asking for trouble. I fear that it would lead to more objections of the litigious, bureaucratic, meta type. Even though it's a tiny minority of users who make such objections, they have a lot of energy for it and there are many more of them than us. That kind of thing could quickly burn us out, like an unintended DoS attack. On the other hand, maybe it would just work fine; it's hard to know.

Also, I'm skeptical that it would create more confidence in the site, because the users who want to feel that way basically already do, and the ones who don't probably wouldn't be persuaded by more data. There's always going to be something that's not included, or the suspicion that there is.

Because of this, the way we address concerns is to answer people's individual questions, here and by email. We're happy to do that, and there basically isn't anything we aren't willing to explain. That's by design. We try never to do anything that isn't defensible to the community. Even when there are genuine secrets that can't be spelled out, like how the anti-abuse software works, we can say what they are at a high level and why a secret is needed. Those cases are rare.