The nut of why they're doing it (and relevant to sites like HN as well):<p><i>[C]licking on stories merely to discover what they're about is a frustrating chore. Unlike most other news sites, we'd rather save our readers clicks than force them through a maze of pages to catch up on news. Techmeme therefore values headlines rich on specifics: headlines with names, numbers, and active verbs. Headlines that function as abstracts.<p>Unfortunately for us, publishers understandably write headlines suiting their own needs, and not necessarily ours. The reasons for this are numerous, and varied:<p>[…useful list of original-headline problems elided…]<p>As a result, Techmeme is often forced either to post a story with a nebulous headline, wait for a publication that rewrites the news with a clear headline (leading many publishers to wonder why) or pass on stories altogether. Since all of these choices are far from ideal, we've now resolved to produce Techmeme-optimized titles "in-house".</i><p>I'd love to see an HN/Reddit-like site that, just as it has a never-ending tournament for story ranking, has a mini-tournament on each story for the most informative headline.