A harassment campaign on Goodreads

The original title, "Lax Security and Moderation at Goodreads Allows Trolls to Spoof People, Harass Authors" seemed pretty straightforward to me.

How is it misleading or "linkbait"?

In my observation of the edit patterns being used by moderators, titles are frequently edited when they contain emotionally charged words ("spoof" "trolls" "harass" in this one) to create bland, boring titles no matter what the source article is titled (not violating guidelines).

One person's idea of making titles more boring is probably another person's idea of removing bias. Bland might not necessarily be bad in these cases.

Well it's worth noting that the original title is an accusation. The guy who is the target of the attack thinks this is lax security, but do we know that? We haven't heard what the people from Goodreads are doing to address this.

People who read the article will be exposed to this "bias" anyway. Leaving the title as-is would then be more informative.

Here, the change is okay. Other times, the change rendered the title nonsensical: "XYZ is now closed source" -> "XYZ Changelog".

I would default to a much stronger preference for the original article-the author/editor probably put more thought into the title, and destroying their creative work shouldn't be routine.

And what's with the bias-paranoia? People, including journalists, are allowed to have opinions and emotions. They do not have to equivocate: "The sanitary situation in the camp is becoming dangerous" does not require "...but someone on YouTube believes germ theory is a hoax, so who is to say if sleeping in feces isn't just a good way to stay warm".

> Other times, the change rendered the title nonsensical: "XYZ is now closed source" -> "XYZ Changelog".

My understanding of this policy is that the editorializing should be done in the comments rather than the submission of the title. -- A submission (and presumably number of upvotes/comments from others) already indicates that the article has some importance, and opinions about it have a 'level playing field' in the comments.

I think this also supports that the comment section is the place for interesting/insightful discussion.

> I would default to a much stronger preference for the original article-the author/editor probably put more thought into the title, and destroying their creative work shouldn't be routine.

And what's routine? How often are titles changed? How often is this viewed as beneficial to the majority, and how often is it viewed as detrimental?

If you're looking for a set of rules that result in the best solution every time, you're going to be disappointed. Whatever solution you come up with, even if it perfectly matched your sensibilities, would be misapplied in some instances because people are responsible for applying it.

The real question is how good of a job is being done on editorializing the submission titles already, and going off what we can remember of past instances is IMO worse than useless, it's likely rife with multiple forms of cognitive bias.

There's probably a good discussion to be had as to how well the title editorializing is here, but it rarely happens in response to someone posting about a specific title. If I had to guess, the discussion resulting from the post in the recent past about the site that tracked all HN submission name changes (which I never got a chance to read closely) might have some good discussions (as that data set is probably a good base to explore this topic usefully).

> and destroying their creative work shouldn't be routine.

I'm pretty sure their work remains intact.