I clicked on this when it was still Light Table Playground and that was interesting to me, but "It's Playtime"? What the hell is that? It doesn't tell me anything at all about the article and I only figured it out by clicking on the comments.
I don't see anything wrong with having a title that is different than the source's title if it gives CONTEXT, which it did in this case.
My current hypothesis is that it's an individual moderator (perhaps showing off) running a script without official sanction, hence the silence from the admins.
The way the post on the subject[0] was buried without official comment after over 500 upvotes suggests a certain amount of institutional blindness.
I think PG did comment on a subsequent post asking why post on subject[0] was taken down. I am not sure if commenting on a soon-to-be-killed post constitutes an official comment though, perhaps it was decided there is no need since according to policy meta-concerns should be dealt with using email.
So instead of having a thread pop up to address meta-concerns, they have to be dealt with privately causing any front page title change to now have 10-20 comments at the top discussing the title change. All the actual discussion about the article is well beneath the fold now
>Hopefully the mystery will bring more people in? haha ;)
I know that's why people use mysterious titles, but trust me - that's done, it's over, it's the old and busted of social news.
It's one of those things that may have worked when social news was new and interesting and still a novelty, and people would click all sorts of stuff wily-nily just to see what neat treasure lies underneath.
But we're all over that, and now what we're dealing with is information overload - how to manage the signal:noise ratio in the information we consume and maximize the signal.
The expectation of informative titles is a key part of that, so all mysterious titles do now now is piss people off for making them click to see what the article was about, instead of just telling them in the submission title, which is what it's for.
You as a submitter (or advertiser, I've seen studies on this for SEM) are much better served writing a concrete, informative title. You may have less clickthroughs (but sometimes more - specifics are very effective), but every single one of them will be someone interested in whatever you linked to (or are selling, in the latter case), more likely to read, buy, participate, etc., and less likely to close the window annoyed at having been tricked into wasting a few seconds and attention on something they don't care about.
The new title is definitely better, imho. I hate titles that keep me guessing about what the article is actually about.
"It's Playtime" has zero informative value. At least with the edit I now know it's about Light Table, and can click or skip as necessary and not waste any cycles guessing, or clicking and finding it's something I'm not interested in.
Uninformative titles are a plague. Concrete titles (and concrete language in general, but that's a whole nother blog post) are always better than vague ones, no matter how catchy, cutesy, or kitschy you may think it is.
Edit: Now "It's playtime - Light Table Playground released", after ibdknox altered the blog title. So... success?
I still think it's ridiculous, though.