Ok, you've convinced me that "obviously" was an overstatement. I'll take that word out and tone down that sentence.
What's on topic is what gratifies intellectual curiosity. It may not gratify everyone's, but that's true of every submission.
A single errant flag isn't going to get anyone penalized, but if users show a pattern of flagging intellectually substantive articles on uncommon or unexpected topics (especially non-technical ones, such as about history or the arts), we take away their flagging rights. Those are some of the best and most underrepresented article types we see. We need more of them on HN, not less.
The parent article would likely be flagged less if it had a nicer title. A title like "Was Shakespeare a Woman?" likely sets off a lot of warnings on peoples' clickbait radars, causing people to flag the submission without even reading the article.
I agree completely, and normally we'd edit that out, but having read the article, I don't think it's that fair to do so. That's why I added the extra information after it—in the hope of cooling down the dreaded title fever.
The crazy thing is: it's got a question mark, in the fucking headline. There's a question mark in the fucking headline.
Can people not just go "erm... no?" internally, when the question offends them?
Truly we are lost.
EDIT: Perhaps downvoters are assuming that while the headline actually reads "Was Shakespeare a woman?", it could instead read something else. And, yes, that is true. There is a huge number of possible combinations of letters that could occur in a headline, even if we ignore the meaningless ones. But I am restricting myself, perhaps unreasonably, to considering the headline that is actually there.
this is one thing i hate about hacker news' policy of editing (and thus editorializing) titles and links. for one, nobody knows what you two are discussing because no one knows what the original title was, what the original change was, and how those differ from the current title. it just confuses things. and more often i can't find articles i had read earlier in the day because the title and maybe even link has changed. and all that ignores the possibility of editorializing an article's title. to me, the original title, regardless of its provocativeness, is always preferred. if there is a need to update the link, then that should be in a comment and stickied if hacker news had that feature.
What's on topic is what gratifies intellectual curiosity. It may not gratify everyone's, but that's true of every submission.
A single errant flag isn't going to get anyone penalized, but if users show a pattern of flagging intellectually substantive articles on uncommon or unexpected topics (especially non-technical ones, such as about history or the arts), we take away their flagging rights. Those are some of the best and most underrepresented article types we see. We need more of them on HN, not less.