The HN community has been a big part of Indie Hackers, even helping me come up with the idea for the site in the first place.
I've made a ton of submissions in the past 8 months and experimented with various combinations of stories/titles that the HN audience might like, without always being successful. (Probably one out of every 4-5 submissions turned into an angry mob haha)
To speak specifically to your point about the titles, an essential element of Indie Hackers is that I require companies to share revenue numbers, because it really adds context to their stories (although it is certainly clickbaity, too). The mods actually okay'd me adding revenue numbers to submission titles[1], but I've mostly avoided it with recent submissions.