I'm not a mod, but I can answer your three main questions. 1.) Why do titles get changed? 2.) Why do URLs get changed? 3.) Why do things drop off the front p

I'm not a mod, but I can answer your three main questions. 1.) Why do titles get changed? 2.) Why do URLs get changed? 3.) Why do things drop off the front page? The first two questions are answered in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In short, is says to always avoid "linkbait" and misleading titles, and always submit the original source URL. If someone suggests a URL to the original source, then changing the URL helps everybody. The same is true for changing bad titles. Regurgitated blogspam with a linkbaiit title is always annoying, and most aggregators fight against it every single day. The third question is tougher to answer, since you'd need to do a whole lot of reading. The two most common things which will cause the rank of a submission to drop are users flagging the story, and setting off the voting ring detector (i.e. trying to fake up-votes). Sam Altman (hn user: sama, YC S05, and a YC Partner) mentioned the ring voting detector issues here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941 And somewhere in the comments of our fearless public moderator Daniel Gackle (hn user: dang) was mentioned the issue about user flags affecting the rank of stories. Your fourth question: 4.) Is it fair to attribute something to a user that they did not actually submit? If you failed to follow the guidelines, then yes, it is fair because it helps everyone else on HN. For notes, I've had titles of my submissions edited for clarity, and the only part that bothers me is that I made a moderator do unnecessary work that I should have done myself. EDIT: Found the link where dang mentions user flags sinking a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008472