[jpmitchell]

I have no idea what happened. I literally just copy and pasted my post title for the submission. I assume there's some form of active curation going on. I've only recently started posting my content to Hacker News so I'm not sure yet.

[slater]

It's well-known that HN mods will edit submission titles to reduce chances of flamewars/axe-grindiness in the discussions. Not saying that's what happened here, but not a new thing.

[albedoa]

I would love to hear the excuse that the mods have for this title change. Good luck to them!

[slater]

Excuse? They don't need an excuse, "How Microsoft abuses its users" isn't very descriptive. The edited title reduces the heat and gives more info.

[jpmitchell]

That's a fair point. I enjoy being a _bit_ provocative, but that title might have been a bit much.

[dang]

Yes, it's fairly straightforward - if a title is too baity, we edit it, in keeping with this guideline:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

However, when we do that, we always try to find a representative phrase within the article itself. We try not to make up our own wording but rather to let the article speak for itself. In this case, we found this sentence:

> Microsoft is very obviously employing dark patterns in order to goad its users into paying for Onedrive storage

However, since that's also a provocative claim, we added a question mark at the end. This is also a standard moderation edit; it's basically shorthand for "the article argues for controversial claim X, but whether that's true or not is something each reader can decide for themselves". In this way the title that appears on the frontpage becomes more neutral, which is what we're going for.

[Dylan16807]

The question mark is pretty bad though.