[throw4847285]

But isn't that circular? If the ranking algorithm used by the mods tends to devalue articles like this because they don't trust the user base to comment intelligently, doesn't that alter the culture of this site to make that more true?

[dang]

I'm not sure what big_toast meant, but we do trust the user base to comment intelligently (which sometimes works and sometimes not), and we don't devalue articles like this.

We do tend to devalue titles like this, or more likely change them to something more substantive (preferably using a representative phrase from the article body), but I'm worried that if I did that here we would get howls of protest, since YC is part of the story.

[throw4847285]

I'm sure you're sick of comments about moderation, but I will say, this makes me more sympathetic to the position you're in.

It's an interesting dilemma. Many very respected publications use provocative titles because of the attention economy. And I'm sure you have good data that provocative titles lead to drive-by comments and flame wars.

But I don't think big_toast was entirely wrong that there is a side effect of sometimes burying articles that are by their nature provocative. And how do you distinguish a flame war over a title from a flame war over content? That's not a leading question. I don't know.

[dang]

For us the litmus test isn't the title, it's whether the article itself can support a substantive discussion on HN. If yes, then we'll rewrite the provocative title to something else, as I mentioned. Ironically this often gives the author more of a voice because (1) the headline was often written by somebody else, and (2) we're pretty diligent about searching in the article itself for a representative phrase that can serve as a good title.

If, on the other hand, the title is provocative and the article does not seem like it can support a substantive discussion on HN, we downweight the submission. There are other reasons why we might do that too—for example, if HN had a recent thread about the same topic.

How do we tell whether an article can support a substantive discussion on HN? We guess. Moderation is guesswork. We have a lot of experience so our guesses are pretty good, but we still get it wrong sometimes.

In the current case, the title is baity while the article clearly passes the 'substantive' test, so the standard thing would have been to edit the title. I didn't do that because, when the story intersects with YC or a YC-funded startup, we make a point of moderating less than we normally do.

I know I'm repeating myself but it's pretty random which readers see which comments, and redundancy defends against message loss!