> That's not a valid generalization because it leaves out all the cases which actually improve things—those go unnoticed and unremarked on. I notice them all t

> That's not a valid generalization because it leaves out all the cases which actually improve things—those go unnoticed and unremarked on. I notice them all the time and I don’t remark on them most of that time because I’m trying to observe the posting guidelines and I’m loathe to open up my email client to question each one. > One thing that also goes unremarked on is that when we see people complaining about titles, we nearly always change the title until the complaints stop. That’s a fair point, but the existing practice of editing titles by default creates a fair bit of this problem and complaining comes with strong incentives to ignore the problem if you disagree with the solution. I appreciate 99.999% of how you run this community, but this one sticks in my craw a lot because it’s so well designed to confirm built in assumptions and so poorly designed for refinement. But mostly because it’s so hamfisted. Like… you have so many already built in tools for signaling that something is probably low quality without editing anything! Why not just dim the “bait” words, or even only show them to people like me who keep “showdead” on? I get a lot more from authors’ titles than I get from the externally edited version of them I often see here. So much so that I often click links I don’t even care about just because I suspect their titles are edited and I wonder what they originally said. I doubt you’ll reach the same conclusion I have (that it’s better just to not edit titles at all), but I hope you can understand that any editorial process for submissions here that alters submitted content makes all of the content suspect to me, and that I’d rather be upset by a published title than have an artificial one instead.