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Disincentivizing All-Caps Headlines on Stacker News #584

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ghost opened this issue Oct 24, 2023 · 2 comments · May be fixed by #590
Open

Disincentivizing All-Caps Headlines on Stacker News #584

ghost opened this issue Oct 24, 2023 · 2 comments · May be fixed by #590
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difficulty:medium-hard feature new product features that weren't there before

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@ghost
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ghost commented Oct 24, 2023

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The number of posts with all-caps headlines on Stacker News seems to be rising lately, and it is clear by now that the primary purpose of all-caps headlines is to evoke stronger emotions from readers. The capitalization of every headline letter doesn't actually give readers any additional information about a topic... it just makes people feel like they're being yelled at.

Describe the solution you'd like
To fix this problem, Stacker News should implement a capital letter threshold for all post headlines (manually-generated links, auto-generated links, discussions, ads, polls, jobs, and bounties).

If a headline includes more than 12 capital letters, the poster will receive a notice directly above the "post" button that says "because you've used more than 12 capital letters in your heading, your post will cost 100x more" or something similar.

This means that if a poster would otherwise be charged 1 sat to post, their all-caps title will cost 100 sats. If they would otherwise be charged 10 sats for their post, their all-caps title will cost 1,000 sats, and on and on.

The number 12 is high enough that people who include acronyms or many short, capitalized words in their titles will not be penalized, but those who insist on capitalizing every letter in their title will. The 100x increase in posting cost is also high enough that it will either disincentivize people from creating all-caps titles, or it will generate far more rewards for other stackers.

Additional context
By enforcing this new threshold, we can also remove our current defenses against all-caps titles.

Our current defense system doesn't allow the second letter of the title for manually-generated link posts to be capitalized. However, there are still many all-caps titles that persist across SN despite this rule, and well-intentioned posters that want to refer to acronyms in their link titles have the unfortunate side effect of having the second letter in their acronym turned into a lowercase letter.

@ghost ghost added the feature new product features that weren't there before label Oct 24, 2023
@SatsAllDay
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SatsAllDay commented Oct 26, 2023

we can also remove our current defenses against all-caps titles.

What are those defenses?

Edit: lol, if I just kept reading...

Our current defense system doesn't allow the second letter of the title for manually-generated link posts to be capitalized. However, there are still many all-caps titles that persist across SN despite this rule, and well-intentioned posters that want to refer to acronyms in their link titles have the unfortunate side effect of having the second letter in their acronym turned into a lowercase letter.

@SatsAllDay
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I can work on this one. It seems pretty similar to my most recent PR (#588) in that it's fee-related, so it's probably a good next issue for me to tackle.

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difficulty:medium-hard feature new product features that weren't there before
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