This is a problem I've had submitting some academic papers as well. Usually if I was tempted to submit at all, there is a specific angle I think might be intere

This is a problem I've had submitting some academic papers as well. Usually if I was tempted to submit at all, there is a specific angle I think might be interesting to HN, which may not be the same one in the title. Maybe I'm wrong sometimes, but I think it would at least make more sense to give me 5-10 words to explain what I think is interesting about a particular submission from an HN perspective, essentially, "why are you submitting this?". But since HN is hostile towards "custom" titles, the explanation of why you're submitting has to be contained entirely in the original title text. That results in implicitly favoring articles from sources that start without an impedance mismatch, so to speak: places where the titles are already pre-targeted specifically to appeal to our demographic, maybe even to HN specifically, and often written with that SEO purpose in mind. That results in a fairly narrow range of sources, and at least partly explains the success of HN-targeted media like TechCrunch here. The end result, as you note, is that a policy against sensationalizing titles actually ends up rewarding sources that sensationalize their titles.