This is an off-topic comment, but in the title it seems the word "for" was repla...

napsterbr · on Oct 18, 2021

> Was it done because of length constraints?

Yep, most likely. The title has exactly 80 characters, which is the limit. "Years" was also abbreviated.

drannex · on Oct 19, 2021

Personal opinion, but I think it's time that HN increases the character limit, we are seeing more and more of these sort of things.

kazinator · on Oct 19, 2021

It's a tricky business. In terms of raw screen width, we have it. Or do we? Not necessarily on mobile, in portrait orientation.

From a readability/usability perspective, imagine the HN front page being filled top to bottom with titles, some of which go to 150 characters; what would that be like?

(A mock-up could be easily obtained for evaluation; or HN could just experiment with it for a few days.)

Currently, most titles don't strain the existing limit. When we scan the front page now, for instance, there are good many short and medium length titles.

A modest increase, say by +20 characters, might relieve most of the pressure without too many negative effects. Which is to say that maybe the current limit is a bit to the left of the true "sweet spot".

tux3 · on Oct 19, 2021

I think I'd be happy with longer titles, since that's an artificial limitation separate from how we vote and judge submissions.

If posts have unnecessarily long titles enough to bother, they'll be systematically downvoted a little more and fall out of practice.

If the system wanted to put a hard limit on wordiness, it should have a good reason why!

We're all wasting a little time on inefficiencies otherwise.

colechristensen · on Oct 19, 2021

You could also change “receives” to “gets” and eliminate the word “treatment” to remove all need for awkward shortening.