[zoltz]

Thank you for the explanation! In my 2nd paragraph I had older stories in mind where it's most likely a case of "either I submit it or nobody does". I can see now how my proposal is bad in the "normal" case of hot, new stories.

There should be enough interesting stories out there with good, informative, neutral original titles that it won't be another seven years.

[smeyer]

Why shouldn't "being first to post confers no privilege..." not extend to "being the only one to post confers no privilege..."?

[zoltz]

From the guidelines: "If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead". This would seem to explicitly allow telling others how to perceive a story, so I don't really see how the privilege thing can be the crucial point. But reading dang's comment I realised how an inferior title might damage the prospects of a story that would have been submitted under a better title by someone else.