It saddens me that high-quality content, even if it's extremely interesting for hackers, can fail to gain traction on HN because of the policy of using original article titles. The author might write a great piece that lots of us would be very interested to read, but if they don't pick a good title it will never last on HN long enough for anyone to see it. I've seen many instances where something highly interesting was on the front page of HN for a short time - until a moderator came along and changed the submission to use the original title, even if it's less descriptive. And then it bombs if the title isn't eyecatching or if it doesn't appeal specifically to the part of the content that HN would find appealing. An otherwise great article, that might have lots to appeal to HN readers, will fail for something as simple as the page title not emphasizing the part that hackers would find interesting but another part of the content.<p>I understand (or at least presume) that the intent of the "original titles policy" is to avoid people submitting clickbait titles just to bring undue attention to their submissions.<p>But isn't there a way of applying the policy in a narrower way, so that great content that isn't well-titled still stands a chance on HN?<p>(In my mind, I'm thinking that it should be relatively easy for mods to distinguish between title changes that are obviously clickbait, and title changes that are simply more descriptive of the content. Right now, the policy is applied in an absolute way, which is evenhanded and fair, but means we're missing out on some great stuff just because the original author titles their content generically or in a way that doesn't mention the parts that would be interesting to HN readers)<p>I know this has come up before, and I fully expect <i>this</i> post to go nowhere. But it doesn't hurt to try! I really think that descriptive titles, not original titles, should be the order of the day. Just my opinion!
Sadly people tend to use clickbaity titles. That leads to pointless meta discussion about choice of words.<p>I agree that I'm probably missing interesting content that is poorly named. But I support moderators / software revertg to original titles.