Could a moderator change the "Teams" in the title to lowercase (as it is in the article)? Capitalizing Teams misleadingly implies it's regarding Microsoft's chat platform.
>We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product.
What's happening is that lowercase "sentence case" titles have become more popular and normalized so repeated exposure to that style can cause a subconscious heuristic of "Capitalized letter signifies a Brand Name or Proper Noun". You can try to advise people not to assume that but it doesn't change the type of "sentence case" titles people are now repeatedly exposed to.
The New York Times still uses "Title Case" but a lot of other newspapers switched to lowercase sentence case. Washington Post switched in 2009. And Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, etc all followed.
Other popular websites with lowercase titles include Vox, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, etc.
Given how Microsoft has been putting OpenAI models all over their products, I was 100% certain the title referred to including ChatGPT in Microsoft Teams and only surprised it wasn’t called Co-Pilot for Teams.
In this case the original title is "ChatGPT for teams", so the headline was actually editorialized when it was submitted, which is discouraged by HN guidelines.
Normally it would be ok to capitallize words to match what many other US publications use, but this capitalization introduces confusion. I can only speak for myself, but I made the assumption that this was an integration with MS Teams. This would have been avoided if the original title was kept.
Title case in unavoidably mentally taxing. It's trivial to convert sentence case to title case, but highly non-trivial in general to convert title case to sentence case (I know, I write code to do this :-)) To do it right, context, or even general intelligence is required. Basically, converting to Title Case looses information (capitalization) that can be important.
Title case was invented when there were much limited typographical options than now, to emphasize, well, titles. On a web page, there are so many better ways to do it, there is no reason to preserve the archaic convention.
> I made the assumption that this was an integration with MS Teams.
"ChatGPT for Microsoft Teams", marketed under the name Copilot, has been a Microsoft Teams feature for a while. What new thing did you expect when you read this?
The reading process is automatic. It's quite likely that capitalized "Teams" is read by may as the product name. And it's reasonable, because in most daily contexts, "teams" refers to actual "teams" and "Teams" refers to the product. Nobody (including you) is going to teach them to stop doing that. Adapting a rather dumb capitalization rule is a lot easier.
I do agree that editors should read their topics critically and add disambiguating text (if possible and permitted).
Teams is a very generic product name. Microsoft can live with the consequences of that.
When I read the headline, I was not thinking of MS Teams. Because I only use MS Teams a few rare times a year. Mainly I use Zoom.
But even if OpenAI had an article that with the rules of headline capitalization of HN ended up reading “Dall-E adds Zoom Feature” I would have imagined that it was about being able to zoom into pictures. Not automatically assumed that it had anything to do with Zoom. Even though I use Zoom almost every day.
> Teams is a very generic product name. Microsoft can live with the consequences of that.
Quite the contrary, Microsoft earns free advertisement from this. The problem is for the people that misunderstand the heading, not for Microsoft
Ok, you would understand it correctly even the Zoom example. So?
Heading should be optimized for the most possible amount of people, there is a clear possibility that a lot of people misunderstand the title, so why not simply edit it? In that case neither you nor anyone else would understand something wrong
The vast majority of people aren’t going to make the association. Even in the HN demo.
I think people are vastly over estimating Microsoft’s ownership over ‘Teams’. Even within a tech context.
Plus, everything we’ve seen from Microsoft in their partnership with OpenAI has been Co-Pilot. Which is why I use MS Teams daily and did not make the connection.
You are wrong and the vast majority of people are making the association.
I showed the title to five colleagues and all of them assumed it referred to Teams the product. Not to mention the overwhelming majority of people in these threads.
How do you know about "vast majority of people"? Did you run a survey?
I for one also thought it was Microsoft Teams in the heading.
If a heading misleads even a fraction of readership, for no apparent reason (what is the benefit of having a title in Title Case?), maybe it's better that the heading is changed, no?
We shouldn't. However a style guide that requires Title Case for a digital element that is very clearly a title (made clear by the various web design in which it appears) is outdated, and sentence case is more appropriate
>We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product.
We shouldn’t but many of us do. As a title word, there’s ambiguity if it’s a proper noun or not given title styling. Given the context in this case (HN, OpenAI, ChatGPT) it was pretty difficult for my brain to not assume it was referring to Microsoft Teams so it baited me in, perhaps unintentionally. I’m not too upset about it because I knew that going in but none the less, a quick read of the title should make it obvious to call it “ChatGPT for Collaboration” or something of that nature.
Why should the sentence be capitalized in the first place? A quick scan on other submissions seems to indicate it is not true, at least for longer sentence. Why should a shorter sentence be then?
Claiming it is a title wouldn’t win the argument either. As it is not a rule that titles must have title casing. Both (title case vs first letter capital only) are valid typography of a title in English.
I also assumed that this was ChatGPT for MS Teams. The title that the webpage uses is "ChatGPT for teams" and I believe that HN tries to use the titles from the linked page verbatim.
>"ChatGPT Team" is the title of the webpage from a user comment... "ChatGPT for teams" (lowercase 't') is the actual original title of the submitted webpage
Sorry, I think you're the one adding confusion.
"ChatGPT for teams" is not the title of the submitted webpage. It's the heading of the article on that page, but the actual title, as shown in the tab strip and defined in the html header, is "ChatGPT Team":
>It's the heading of the article on that page, but the actual title,
Yes, I understand that but 99% in this thread talking about "title" is the article's headline(title) that has the word "for" in it "ChatGPT for teams" and not the HTML tags <title>ChatGPT Team</title> or <meta property="og:title">
In other words, people in this thread are not complaining about "ChatGPT Team" in the browser's tab title or confused by it. Instead, they're talking about the other title "ChatGPT for Teams" that was submitted and manually changed from lowercase 't' to uppercase 'T' and prominently visible at the top of this thread. That's the context of this meta discussion about confusing capitalization causing some readers to incorrectly assume the headline is about a new ChatGPT addon feature for MS Teams: (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-s...)
The singular "Team" in product name "ChatGPT Team" doesn't cause the same confusion because Microsoft doesn't have a branded product called "Team". That's why citing "<title>ChatGPT Team</title>" ... does not help clarify things and just adds more confusion to this thread.
>Hacker New's code uses the html title element (which in this case is actually a meta element) to automatically title submissions.
Are you sure? In the past, HN commenters have been annoyed that the HN software does not extract and parse the HTML <title> element automatically and defers too much to the titles that submitters manually type in which often leads to editorialization and/or confusion.
The UK stopped capitalising every word in headlines back in the 1980s maybe earlier. It looks much nicer and is more readable. The bold tells you it is a geadline. US newspaper graphic design seems very retro to me.
Local style guide says not to capitalise headlines, presumably.
Though you are right, the general rule here is not to change headlines and that should probably apply to style as well as wording. Looking at other posts on the main list there seems to be a mix as the original styles (sentence cap, all words capitalised, all but articles, …) have been kept.
Maybe in the AI Twittersphere it started with sama, but it’s been becoming common in Gen Z culture for a few years now. If you look up popular bands at the moment, you’ll find a decent chunk of them only use lowercase in their band and song names.
I’m in gen z and usually type in all lowercase on my phone because I have autocorrect turned off and capitalizing the letters would be more work. Generally though, the aesthetic has become more associated with girls, I suspect because of women popular among girls being early to/pioneering the trend (namely Emma Chamberlain’s all lowercase youtube video titles and Rupi Kaur’s poetry books being entirely lowercase)
The phone only auto capitalizes the first letter of a sentence. If you end up changing it sometimes it doesn't get replaced with a capital. If you get frustrated with autocorrect features, often modern phones don't allow you to select which features to turn off and you're forced to turn everything off, at least that's how it was during the time i learned to type with the phone. I'm not gen z but I'd say it has a lot to do with it being much more cumbersome to capitalize a letter on the phone than the keyboard.
Plus, there's also the aesthetic, for a while we did it out of angst and to show we weren't all that wrapped up in the modern sensibilities. It seems like the situation as society moved forward may have only gotten worse for this.
If you're confused about something gen z does, it's either:
1) they're teenagers and grew up with phones, get with the times old man
2) a large corporation that didn't have a monolopy on communication (maybe basically everything else too) when you grew up now does and its an artifact of being forced to grow in that world
3) global warming is scary as shit, no one in power seems to give a shit, economies are crumbling, we're temporarily losing the worldwide battle for continued democracy, why wont they stop the war, school shootings, nuclear destruction isn't too close but doesn't look like it's getting farther away, etc etc etc. Basically, "have you seen the world? Why are you even trying, let alone the teenagers today?" type thing.
You can disable the option on phones to auto capitalize.
Again, my observation here is not that "TVs should stay grayscale" but that this lowercase movement is now being used to "fight the AI generated content" which I find pretty funny because it makes no sense. You can tell ChatGPT to write in lowercase.
It especially got traction after @sama's tweet that had no intention to associate it with non-GPT content, but just weirdly flexed that he types in lowercase.
Also note that HN automatically applies the capitalization rules to submitted headlines. So you don’t really need to do any changes to the capitalization yourself when you submit.
And for understanding how the rules work, I agree that Wikipedia article is good.
Like a big chunk of the language, English capitalisation is nonsensical and descriptivist. Different organisations have different rules just like different audiences have different expectations, and there is no single way to capitalise words in titles.
I'm with the parent comment on this one: for this particular headline it makes sense to lowercase "teams", since the HN audience will tend to correlate the uppercase version with the incorrect meaning of the headline.
Generally, capitalize longer words. But this really depends on the style book you choose to follow (MLA, APA, CMOS). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case
