Sorry, the title missed the bigger draw for me: This was written by H.G. Wells! The title should make that clear. This was not just anyone asking "Who the hell is this Joyce...?"
HN tries to de-emphasize authors in titles. The year should be in there, though, to cue the reader that it's probably a historically interesting author. We'll add that.
I really wish you wouldn't, though I can see some of the merits of this. Fact is, reputation does matter.
I disagree strongly with publications that do this, most especially for current works. The Economist doesn't have bylines at all (and have an explainer for this, which utterly fails to persuade -- the less charitable explanation is that many of the stories are written by young recent grads with little actual depth and who wouldn't be considered other than the publication's umbrella branding), The Register omits bylines from its overview page, though they're featured on articles themselves. Arguably the justification is the inverse of The Economist's.
That analogy doesn't hold up because HN isn't a publication, it's a list of links.
It's nearly always trivial to figure out who the author of a post is. The question is whether that should be emphasized in the title, and HN's traditional default is no. Focusing on content rather than personalities seems to produce better discussion.
As I said, I understand your reasoning (your description is as I'd thought it would be). I disagree with it.
Arguing over whether or not HN is a publication is awfully semantic. At the very least, it's a publication of links and the commentary of them. So we disagree there as well, though that's not particularly material.
There's a deeper issue of reputation, credibility, consequences, and more, that matter. This ties strongly into my "Big Questions" re-asking (submitted an hour or so back), and a suggestion from Ted Lemon in 2015: that a very large part of the addressible problem we're facing is the noosphere -- a superset of media, all of human thought. There's something very broken (and some terrifying consequences) to how ideas are created, propagated, (or propagandised), distorted, mistated, etc.
I'm not sure how to fix this. I'm not sure that it's fixable.
When I first started studying science -- in primary school -- I found the mentions of scientists names and such to be distractions. Shouldn't the ideas matter more than the person who had them? I've completely reversed my thinking, because it seems to me impossible to consider an idea without understanding the context within it, and context matters. The person themselves matters.
I've been thinking a lot about reputation, identity, and community, particularly regards my recent experiences with Imzy, and constrasting that to other spaces. In particular, identity IS reputation in a whole lot of ways -- starting with the etymologies of "fame", "reputation", "fame", "honor". Fully anonymity is also full impunity, and at least my experiences elsewhere suggest that works poorly. I've contrasted that strongly to HN's practices and results. Even where I don't always agree, or find elements frustrating, one thing HN does is, generally, allow tensions to dissipate fairly quickly, through UI/UX (including some of the annoying or missing elements of it), moderation, examples set, and more.
I realise that offering authors names risks a cult of personality. At the same time, some good (and bad) reputations are well deserved. Electronic communications generally strip away many of the normal social queues. Stripping away the few that are left, most especially authorship, strikes me as heading the wrong way. I'm a fan of Jakob Nielsen's microcontent guidance.
I'm also increasingly convinced that not offering users tools to quantify and qualify the content they access online is a tremendous failing of present tools. I've a limited capacity to really process information and messages, various sources (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg, NY Times moderation desk) suggest ~150 - 300 emails, ~800 comment moderations, are about the upper limit of what someone can sustainably absorb or process per day, over the long term. And that is if this is their full-time job. If you're looking at assimilating quality and complex information, the count's likely far lower.
As such: cues to quality, including reputation and identity, matter.
Beautiful response. I was going to take a different direction, but yours makes better reading.
Dan writes: HN tries to de-emphasize authors in titles.
But HN should also remember that the goal is to improve the discussion, not to just to follow the preexisting rules. In this particular case, I think adding "H.G. Wells" would have helped rather than hurt the discussion. If you think the same, you probably should have added it. If you think the final discussion is better without (perhaps you are right, the quality was good, and had the name been added maybe this would be the first in an onslaught of rerepublished letters by science fiction authors who've been dead for 100 years) then you should keep it off. But as the one making the rules, it's kind of cheating for you to point at them as explanation for your actions.
I am extremely socially oriented. I think there is way the hell too much cult of personality on HN as is. I thought the addition of the date was an elegant response and I was impressed that my comment was quickly responded to by Dan Gackle, the lead moderator, because I was in no way critising titling practices on HN when I made the observation. I was critising The Paris Review.
