[dredmorbius]

I would prefer that the alternative of posting either a link or explanatory text be changed to allow both.

Often a title, original or otherwise, simply doesn't provide sufficient context to clearly explain a link. A few well-chosen words of prose could help here (more so if the text could be editied / modified while the post was sitting in queue). Gameable? Perhaps, but we can vote down / flag in that instance.

"Heat & Thunder" was pretty non-obvious to me, and until I read the comment here about the data visualization, struck me as particularly non-interesting.

[_delirium]

I agree; that's one thing that I think has really gotten worse from the Slashdot model to the Digg/Reddit/HN model. The Slashdot blurbs weren't great, but a bare list of links even more emphasizes linkbait and what you might call "easy" content (articles with one clear point that can be summarized in 5 words). In that ecosystem, anything that takes even three sentences to explain the appeal of tends not to go anywhere.

I end up not submitting most of the long-form or academic things I think HN readers might find interesting as a result, since just from the headline probably nobody will know why it was submitted or why they should care. Sometimes if I think something is really good I'll make an exception and submit, followed by posting a comment explaining why I thought the submission was interesting. That occasionally works, but I think most people don't click through to comments on the New page.

I'm not really blaming the readers, because I find the same problem browsing the New page myself: in this list of cryptic headlines, the only thing that stands out are controversy-type headlines ("Why you should never X"), and the rest is hard to skim.

[saraid216]

I also decided not to click through on the "Heat & Thunder" article until I saw here that it's about visualizations.