Those titles weren't editorialized. They were edited in keeping with HN's title rule, which calls for editing titles when they are either misleading or clickbait.
I realize it's annoying when there's an edit that you don't agree with—and I would never claim that we get every case correct. But HN's overall approach to titles is one of the easiest things to defend about the entire site. It makes an enormous difference to the quality of the front page.
Edit: you can't compare "HN as it is" to "HN as it is, but without the title edits I dislike". That's not a possible alternative. The alternative is "HN without the current title policy", and that would be a front page inundated with linkbait and sensationalism—exactly what most people come here to avoid.
The title policy is fine, but I find it really weird that it's defended as "not editorializing" -- by your own admission, you edit titles to put your own spin on the article's contents, and focus on something different than what the original title wanted to focus on.
"Why I no longer recommend Julia" is a perfectly good title, it's prompting a question which the article will hopefully answer. Changing it to focus on correctness and composability bugs, rather than the bigger picture of why the author can't recommend the language, is putting your own spin, aka, editorializing. And that's fine! But you really should admit it, rather than crouching behind a weird defense.
I'm happy to admit mistakes (and correct them!) but this is inaccurate. We don't edit titles to put our own personal spin on a topic, which is what the word editorializing means. We look closely at the article itself to find what it is actually saying. If we do replace a title, we replace it with representative language from the article itself wherever possible. This has been the case for a long time: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
That does involve some interpretive judgment—because why pick one phrase rather than another—but less than you might think, because nearly every article has a point where the author says what they're actually writing about.
We never do this to convey an opinion of our own. We don't much care what people think or what an article says. We care whether the title accurately represents what the article is saying, and does so in a way that isn't baity, because that is the biggest influence on discussion quality.
The submission you guys are bringing up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861) illustrates the point. "Why I no longer recommend Julia" is a baity title, because it doesn't say anything specific about why. It's just a pointer that says "I boo Julia". "Boo $language" is for sure flamebait on this site.
Such titles generate threads that are just generic boo-vs.-yay ventings between people who like $thing and people who don't. The substantive points of the article are lost under such a title. This is not true on the original blog, because there the title is just the first sentence, and any comments show up only at the end. But it's definitely true on an internet forum where the title is the entire representation of the article for most readers and commenters.
For that reason, we chose to change the title, and for that we looked at the article (https://yuri.is/not-julia/) to find where it says what it is actually about—the "representative language" I mentioned above. This was not hard to find—it's in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th paragraphs of the OP. Particularly the 4th, which reads:
My conclusion after using Julia for many years is that there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters.
That's the article's own summary of what it says, so we made it the title. Basically we followed the pointer and replaced it with what it points to.
How about the second example? The linked article is decidedly not a technical specification or even a discussion about any details of OpenStreetMap's Data Model. The article lacks any snippets of code or map data. It is quite clearly a defense of the simplicity of OpenStreetMap's data model (using analogies and anecdotes) as reflected by the article’s title. How, then, could one possibly justify the title change?
Sorry for the delay in replying. I think you have a stronger case about that example. Most likely we changed the title to make it less baity—"In Defense of" doesn't really add much information except "Fight", and that's a bad way to prime a thread.
Having now read more of the article, though, I agree with you that the title edit changed the focus in a misleading way. I've changed it back now. Maybe "The simplicity of OpenStreetMap's data model", or something like that, might have been an ok compromise, but it's too late to matter.
Moderation is guesswork. Inevitably, we guess wrong sometimes. The best thing is for users to tell us when we've got something wrong, because then we can correct it. In the future, if you would let us know at hn@ycombinator.com instead of posting in the thread, where we're unlikely to see it, we can correct things while the thread is still live. We do that all the time (many times a day), but we can't correct mistakes we don't know about!
> Most likely we changed the title to make it less baity—"In Defense of" doesn't really add much information except "Fight", and that's a bad way to prime a thread.
Such words also signals value, since they signal that someone has something significant to contribute to the conversation. For an extensive discussion about how such words signal value, see Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively:
> The benefits of simplicity in OpenStreetMap's data model
That would have been a great edit. I won't bother doing it now since it's too late to matter, but if you come up with any of those in the future, I'd love to hear about them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861&p=2#31397151
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31638648#31643597