A term cannot be accurate. I understand you're trying to suggest that "censorship" is an accurate way to describe this particular scenario, but that's your own subjective opinion, which IMO, is incorrect. Censorship necessarily implies an intentional effort to squelch a particular person or idea.
If changing the title doesn’t result in actively squelching the old title, I’m not sure how to interpret this. There’s fundamentally a silent middleman choosing the content on the site.
Is this bad? No. This is the whole positive and negative to active moderation.
> If changing the title doesn’t result in actively squelching the old title, I’m not sure how to interpret this.
"Changing a title" is not inherently an act of censorship because there are many reasons why a title could be changed. Changing a title might be censorship, but not always. In this case, it is NOT censorship because the title was modified based on a pre-established submission rule (i.e. from the HN guidelines "use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."), NOT due to any particular prejudice against the ideas expressed in the title.
It also seems a little strange to me that changing a title to reflect the author's actual title can somehow be construed as censorship. It seems to me that the person editorializing the title is more aptly described as a censor than the mechanism that restores the title to the original form and cadence intended by the author.
