Renaming videos and articles after their release seems a very recent phenomenon. I go to a website, or see a new video on youtube that’s news-related, read the headline, read the article or watch the video, then leave and do something else. And when I return to the website to check something else, I discover the title to the thing I’ve already seen has changed.
I’m never quite sure why the change has occurred, but I do know that it is quite inconvenient for me when I think I might be looking at something new when I definitely am not.
I guess I know why they’re doing it. In theory it would be because of a mistake, or improper wording. If they had a title that didn’t reflect what the article or video was about, I would understand the need to change it. And, of course, typos need to be corrected.
But in some cases, more recently, I’ve been seeing perfectly accurate titles being replaced with equally accurate ones, less accurate ones, and sometimes even irrelevant ones. Perfectly good titles are exchanged for ones that will get more views, or play in with some recent phenomenon (that will get more views). And this is something that really disappoints me. I want the places where I go for entertainment to at least keep their original titles (save for fixing typos) the vast majority of the time. When a much-more-appropriate title appears, I am absolutely fine with the previous one being replaced, but if one is replaced on a weekly basis I start to have problems.
Sometimes I don’t name things until I’m done working on them, but often times I have a finished title halfway through production, and not having one, or at least a good idea of one, by the end of the process seems like a large oversight. If you don’t like the title enough that you’d consider changing it later, think for a longer time about it now.
And when news sources do this I feel especially wronged (not in a severe sense, because this is just online, but you get my point, I hope). Many times it’s obviously changed to get more views. Now I’m fine with things being named to get views, but if I have to deal with two click-baity titles on the same piece of material in the same day, I start to not want to view that content. Sometimes there are even more title changes, which may speak to a strange attention disorder and want of more recognition that may be inside the mind of the poster.
In short, I don’t like it! It is passable sometimes, but I feel that it is wrong to an audience to rename multiple times what you have put up for viewing. In my opinion, it attempts to get more views dishonestly and corrects mistakes very rarely. Although I’m not a fan, it still isn’t nearly as bad as the Discovery Channel airing that mermaid “documentary”, though.
