I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probably the single most beneficial thing we do. Without that, the front page would consist of linkbait, sensationalism, and rage. In other words, HN wouldn't exist.
I don't like or dislike any particular title or headline. I dislike the policy of selectively altering an author or publisher's chosen headline in general.
> I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probably the single most beneficial thing we do. Without that, the front page would consist of linkbait, sensationalism, and rage.
I appreciate the insight. Is the plan to keep this policy in place indefinitely in order to protect us from ourselves? I find it very depressing that a community like HN cannot be trusted to look at an unedited list of headlines. Do you think there is any hope of eventually developing something like a collective immunity (or even resistance) to clickbait? If it can't happen here, what does that say about the prospects for media literacy more broadly?
HN's quality, such as it is, very much includes "selectively altering an author or publisher's chosen headline" - publishers and authors (and headline specialists, at media sites) are incentivized to take advantage of the default dynamics to get attention. It's their job to sex up their titles and our job to knock them down to size, if we can. That takes sustained moderator attention.
That's not to criticize the community. HN's system consists of community, software, and moderation, and the community is by far the most valuable of the three. But all three must be active in order to keep HN from deteriorating (or at least to stave it off - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Moderation's job isn't to determine discussion, it's to serve the community by jiggling the system out of its failure modes when it gets stuck in one of them.