I'm not assuming malice, I don't care if he's intentionally being rude or not. A lack of intent isn't a free pass. This site gets visited by a lot of developers, probably a lot of whom use Python, probably a fair share of those use BS, and accusing the project of rotting, especially when that's not what's actually happening, could have an actual negative impact on it going forward.
Titles get changed here all the time, why couldn't this one be changed to just a simple statement of fact, something like: "Beautiful Soup switches parsers, developer requests help replacing lost functionality"? Instead we get this sensational and misleading title, and, yeah, it pisses me off.
Yeah, that would have been a great headline. Then, no one would have read the post, no one would find out the guy would like some help, and the project would be that much closer to sinking into oblivion.
Enough of this nonsense. I think the highly popular nature of the post, and the productive discussion that ensued, means that the post and headline were good. I certainly did the guy more good than harm, by bringing the attention of a community of hackers to this issue.
This reminds me of when I was editor of my college newspaper, and I wrote a headline that said "Student Raped in Gesling Stadium." The university and the campus cops all wanted us to say sexual assault and were pitching a fit. But we felt the strong language was justified, and we printed the word RAPE in big bold block letters. As a result, there was immediately hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on improving campus security.
In this case, I wrote that headline because I knew people would read it, and I knew that they wanted to read it, and I knew that they should read it. The last thing I was doing was trying to give the guy a hard time.
Yeah, my bad, you're totally right, this site (and the world) will be so much better when everyone starts writing catchy, sensational headlines that don't reflect the actual content of their articles. I'm glad you're fighting the good fight to bring that mentality here, I really don't get enough of it at Reddit.
If you didn't assume bad intent (or even if you did, really) then perhaps you should have approached this more civilly. You called his actions 'assholish' and accuse him of 'pretending'. These terms appear to me as an attack on the author and not just his headline. For someone complaining of a rude headline your comments can come off as awfully rude themselves.
You may be right, but I approached it with the idea that he had already made one assholish statement and so there was a higher probability that he was an asshole in general. It takes one to know one, I suppose, but I try to limit my assholishness to people who have already demonstrated a good bit of their own.
Titles get changed here all the time, why couldn't this one be changed to just a simple statement of fact, something like: "Beautiful Soup switches parsers, developer requests help replacing lost functionality"? Instead we get this sensational and misleading title, and, yeah, it pisses me off.