Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers. [..] Some tactics include being deliberately obtuse, appealing to emotions, being controversial, intentionally omitting facts and information, being loud, self-centered and acting to obtain attention. Trivial information and events are sometimes misrepresented and exaggerated as important or significant, and often includes stories about the actions of individuals and small groups of people, the content of which is often insignificant and irrelevant relative to the macro-level day-to-day events that occur globally.
I'm not sure what the original title was here, but in this case the revised version suggests more or less why someone here would want to read it.
About a month ago someone posted an essay on the Python Requests library in a literary journal and titled it something like "A Literary Review of the Python Requests Library", which essentially described what the essay was about: a review of the Requests library as if it were a literary work (http://thediagram.com/12_6/rev_reitz.html).
I noticed this, read the article, and enjoyed reading about Python in an entirely different context.
But then some wise soul determined the word "literary" to cause far too many sensations and updated the title to "Review of Python Requests Library"(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073250), changing the title from something apt to something misleading. As a review of Requests for the HN audience it isn't very good (the review is accurate and well-written in its context, but my guess is a review containing the sentence "Requests is written in a programming language called Python that's known for being easy to read" is perhaps not aimed at the average HN reader looking for a technical review), but as a review of a Python library as if it were a literary work is both funny and thought-provoking.
Would the article have gotten any more attention under its original title? Maybe, maybe not. But this happens noticeably often and it would be nice if folks changing these titles puts a bit more thought in to some of those changes, and not strip out those words meant to describe why someone here would read an article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensationalism