Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him

This post is decaying off of the front page of HN very quickly (every few refreshes it drops a position or more), despite have more upvotes and being posted more recently. Reddit is a YC company as well. Is this post being artificially pushed down?

Nope. Literally the first rule of HN moderation is that we don't do that—i.e., we moderate stories less, not more, when they're negative about YC or a YC startup. Also, we were slacking this afternoon (where by slacking I mean hacking on an arc compiler) and had no clue this thread existed.

It set off the overheated discussion detector (a.k.a. flamewar detector), which lowers the rank of a thread. We do turn that penalty off for particularly substantive discussions—which, though this may surprise you, I'm not sure this one is. Not every Reddit drama shitshow is uniform in its excellence. Can I say that without evil catnip effects?

Edit: ok, we've reduced the penalty and changed the title to something the post actually says. (The submitted title, "Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him", breaks the HN guideline about not changing titles unless they are misleading or linkbait. Please don't do that when submitting here.)

-1 to the title change. The current title doesn't convey the situation effectively and imo serves to hide the true nature of the incident. There isn't really an article title to source from here, anyway.

Here's what I just emailed to a user who asked about the same thing:

I think people can pretty well figure out what the story is from the linked page and the HN comments. No?

There's a downside to spelling things out completely—it gets people out of the habit of doing their own work to figure things out. Admittedly it can sometimes be helpful for getting a story attention in the first place, but once it's on the front page, there's nearly always a good reason for that, and it's good to expect readers to have to dig a little sometimes to find it.

Edit: There's another aspect too. When a title uses language that isn't from the article itself, it typically departs from the article in ways that subtly reframe it into something it isn't. (This is also the case with many media pieces whose headlines are not written by their authors.) For example, the courtroom tone of the submitted title frames this story as a grave breach of trust and leaves out the (I'll be generous) equally important aspect that this is a Reddit shitshow and nothing about it can be taken completely seriously.

This is an important effect to avoid, and sticking to language from the article itself is the way to avoid it.

>There's a downside to spelling things out completely

Are you gonna make every title a puzzle? Or change the title back? Or keep your YC-serving contradiction?

I didn't know who "spez" was until this incident! The title should at least say Reddit! This is a terribly mystifying and non-descriptive title and the previous one was completely accurate.

EDIT WITH REPLY TO THE FOLLOWING:

I only found this thread because I searched "reddit" to see what the discussion was here after reading about this incident in the Yahoo News article. That means I would have passed right over it and not known this article was about Reddit if I had started here because I didn't know what u/spez was yet.

And the title you gave this isn't even a title from the content, it's a partial quote of a line from within the body of a comment underneath a page with a completely different title. All the examples you linked were to pages with titles that were then used or lightly trimmed into the title here (possibly with a year added).

Exactly.

It's like having having some obscure one word titles on the front page for some company/software/hardware/whatever that I have never heard of and the link content does not make it much more clear either.