[sillysaurus3]

I've given up on trying to come up with what I think is the most useful title to HN though, or on trying to guess what the mods will do. I just use the original title and let the mods change it if they want. If I think the original title isn't good at explaining the main point of interest from a HN view, I feel sad, but oh well, that's clearly how HN wants it.

I'm glad HN is like this. It's one of the reasons I enjoy the website.

It might be convenient if HN had a tool like reddit to automatically fetch the title from HTML given a URL. In fact, if they had such a tool, I'd expect HN to maybe actually mandatorily make that the title and not allow you to edit it, since it seems to be HN editorial preferences not to let submitters write titles.

This was tried, I think. It was proven to be a bad idea in practice. If you think the complaints about titles were bad now, you should've seen them when the software did automated reversions. At least, I think they were automated reversions.

Sometimes the subtitle is a better title. Sometimes the original title is clickbaity, as you said. Regardless, it takes a person to moderate the titles.