tptacek, I never suggested that the person submitting the article should have monopoly control of the title. My comment is aimed at dang. I suggest the default question to be answered in the title should be "What part of this article is interesting to the Hacker News crowd?" It's fine if dang re-writes all the titles, but why re-write the title to make it something dull or confusing? We've all seen cases where the original title of a blog post was deemed too strong, and was thus re-written to make it something dull -- the kind of title that a college professor of writing would give a bad grade and suggest "You need a bolder title." We should generally want strong writing, because strong writing is good writing.
Then please email him and the mods directly at hn@ycombinator.com
ADD: in order to keep a high signal to noise ratio. Comments on stories should be reserved for discussing the contents of the story, not meta issues with the forum. For meta issues either email the mods directly or start a meta thread with a Ask HN: post.
From the site guidelines[1]:
If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.
Ah, sorry. That's a more reasonable request. I shouldn't have responded so petulantly.
I still think it's not going to work out. There aren't many moderators, and fixing the titles on this site is a huge amount of work. For instance, it's also probably not reasonable to expect the mods to read every story on the site, or even just the stories with broken titles.
A thing you can do to help is, when an article has a title that doesn't follow the guidelines, suggest a better title. The mods often use those suggestions as the replacement title.
And rather than rely on the moderators having to sift through comments and hope they see a suggested better title, email them directly with the HN submission link/id and your suggested better title.
