HN has a long history of de-sensationalizing link titles, both through automated substitutions and manual changes from moderators. Some aspects of this are in t

HN has a long history of de-sensationalizing link titles, both through automated substitutions and manual changes from moderators. Some aspects of this are in the "News Guidelines" at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: > Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important. > If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. > If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title. > If the 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; don't editorialize. I sometimes wish the guidelines were a bit more transparent, e.g. confirming with the submitter that the meaning of the title hasn't been harmed by an overzealous replacement. The edits are clearly a net positive, but they're confusing when they go wrong. A few months ago @petercooper made an app for tracking live changes to HN headlines, which gives a sense of how frequent they are: https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/ https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/