Very often the original article title assumes the reader is already familiar with a particular context, based on the fact he or she is already visiting the site it is hosted on. This of course does not apply to readers of Hacker News who see the article title totally out of context, surrounded by other articles.
I can see the value in editing titles that excessively call attention to themselves, include a comment by the poster, or inaccurately reflect the content, No one wants the front page of Hacker News to look like a page from Craigslist. The title should accurately describe the content of the article so readers can quickly decide whether to open it or move to the next one. The question asked by moderators should be whether the title fulfills this purpose, not whether it conforms to some bureaucratic guideline. Life is already too much distorted by slavish devotion to bureaucratic guidelines without bringing that mindset to Hacker News.
Too often the original article's title just plain sucks, even if the article content is good.
Many authors are good at writing interesting, informative, and useful content, but simply suck at choosing good titles.
I think some of them don't realize that on news aggregation sites like HN, articles often sink or swim by their title. At the very least, HN users will often not bother to look at something with a boring or generic looking title, and never know that the content was worth it.
Of course, if the submitted title was clearly abusive, like some ebay auction titles, using visual garbage like "* * * * L@@K * * * *", then those those submissions should just be deleted and their submitter warned and then banned if they persist.
But changing titles (by their submitters) to something more informative and interesting than the original article title should be allowed and even encouraged, as long as the new title is not misleading.
If HN admins did this themselves, that would be great. But way too often they change the titles to be more boring and generic (which is sometimes closer to the original article title, and sometimes not). This helps no one. They're effectively making HN less interesting, because fewer people will look at articles with boring and generic titles.
Actually, writers rarely choose the titles to their articles. That's what editors do. So it's the editors of publications that suck at choosing good titles, not the writers.
Many HN submissions are of articles written by authors who don't have any editors. Those articles are self-published either on blogs, personal websites, or forums.
Anyway, regardless of whether an author or editor is responsible for the title, way too many titles to articles with good content suck. Improving on those titles while staying faithful to the article's content should be encouraged, not discouraged or tampered with.
I can see the value in editing titles that excessively call attention to themselves, include a comment by the poster, or inaccurately reflect the content, No one wants the front page of Hacker News to look like a page from Craigslist. The title should accurately describe the content of the article so readers can quickly decide whether to open it or move to the next one. The question asked by moderators should be whether the title fulfills this purpose, not whether it conforms to some bureaucratic guideline. Life is already too much distorted by slavish devotion to bureaucratic guidelines without bringing that mindset to Hacker News.