Arguably, yes. It's written to elicit a strong emotional response that can affect the direction and quality of discussion. After all, one of the primary goals o

Arguably, yes. It's written to elicit a strong emotional response that can affect the direction and quality of discussion. After all, one of the primary goals of HN is quality discussion. The mods have written about this when commenting on title changes: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20changed%20title&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20changed%20title&... In particular, this one seems appropriate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16336433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16336433