Look, I just don’t think you should editorialize without making it clear. Why is the claim controversial, for example?

Edit: I guess we went too deep in the thread, so we're resorting to edits. that was a rhetorical question. It's sort of like the Twitter community notes feature: making the edit, and its reason clear, builds trust. Otherwise, you just look like you're doing something shady (given that, again, the people in the article literally own HN).

In terms of YOUR opinion about the quality of my article – that is what upvotes are for. I guess you have a much heavier hand into what we're allowed to read than I realized! Again, given your incentives, that's worrying.

I wasn't the mod who added the question mark, but I'd guess it's because it makes a grand and speculative claim about the two most hyped topics of recent months. Nothing wrong with that, but in an HN context it generally makes for shallower and hotter discussion, and that is not the best fit for a site like HN which is trying to go deeper. (Note that I said trying, not succeeding.) The question mark is one device we have for dampening that effect sometimes.

One sign of a linkbait title is when it claims a lot more than the article delivers. Usually such articles begin by walking back their own title, since it has served its purpose (getting attention) and is now a handicap (because the text has to deliver on what the title promised). I'm not saying you did this intentionally! But your article follows just this pattern, since by the time you get to the meat of it, the claim has become weaker and in fact has been turned into a question: "what if we thought of Reddit as, functionally, subservient to OpenAI?".

Another thing we often do is replace baity titles with representative language from the article itself. In this case we could do that by using your own question instead of appending a question mark to the original title. That is, we could make the HN title something like "What if we thought of Reddit as subservient to OpenAI?". I think I'll go ahead and do that, since using representative language from the article itself is arguably less of an intervention in this case.

p.s. I just put back your original title. It was a borderline case and not worth arguing over (but maybe the discussion was clarifying or of interest to some readers). Generally when there are strong protests about a title edit we just either roll it back or figure out something that people are happy with.

I appreciate everything you and the mods do here. Enough so that I feel my past behavior on HN has been less than ideal from time to time and I am incentivized to improve it because I respect what you're trying to do here.

However, the staff at HN are doing themselves a disservice and legitimizing criticism with this sort of action. If you feel this content is grand and speculative then downvote it or flag it like anyone else. If you feel it's actively damaging or strongly against the ethos of HN then delete it or sticky a comment at the top of the discussion to give your position and encourage people to flag/downvote.

The author makes a fair observation and does speculate as part of their writing, but speculation happens all the time on HN.

Reddit can be a moat for OpenAI even if the intention wasn't deliberately made.

I appreciate that you're working to improve your contributions to HN!

You might be underestimating how much curation/moderation we do of HN's front page. We do a lot. The front page is not generated by votes and flags alone (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Upvotes and flags are important but the front page is a complex combination of those plus software action plus moderator action. If we didn't have the latter, HN would basically be impossible.

It's a pity—I'd love to manage without moderator action because the latter is tedious and it would be much more fun to write code to do it or just let the upvotes have their way.

Fair, thanks for feedback

> I guess we went too deep in the thread, so we're resorting to edits

You can keep replying - you just need to click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page and the reply box will appear there.

> given that, again, the people in the article literally own HN [...] Again, given your incentives, that's worrying.

What people and what incentives are you talking about here?

> that is what upvotes are for

HN has never operated by upvotes alone. It would be a completely different site if it were (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). HN a curated, moderated site and always has been, and we've always been completely open about this.

dang, just so I don't sound crazy: Michael Seibel is on the board of directors of Reddit. I don't know what sama's involvement is with YC anymore, but I would imagine that his wishes are taken pretty seriously in SV.

This is why I think the editorializing should be made clear: even if your title edits are in good faith – which I totally buy – you want to protect community trust.

That's true, he is. (I forgot that in fact.) FWIW I've never discussed Reddit with him, and there's no pressure to moderate HN any particular way about these things. Our job at HN is to keep the community happy (er, as happy as possible) and to make HN as good as possible. Those are the things that make HN valuable to YC.

It should take only a brief glance at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... to decide whether HN is protecting Reddit - the last two weeks have seen a tsunami of threads, almost all negative. Discussion of OpenAI isn't that lopsided but I wouldn't call it positive. sama isn't involved with YC in any way as far as I know. (Edit: I just asked, and it's a bit more complicated than that - he speaks at batch events occasionally, has ownership in past funds like most former employees do, invests in YC startups sometimes, etc.)

I appreciate the reference to good faith! that is kind of you. FWIW, the reason we don't mark titles as edited, or comments as edited when commenters edit them, or any of that kind of thing, is because HN's UI has always been minimal and in particular has always avoided ceremonial or bureaucratic trappings. This is the sort of quality that dies by a thousand cuts if you start adding details, and I don't think that would be the right tradeoff. It's just not in the overall spirit of the site. That doesn't mean we're trying to hide anything—we're always happy to answer questions about anything on HN, and I spend most of my time doing so.

Regarding my feature request: that makes sense to me. At least, it’s undeniable that you spend a lot of time engaging with any user who questions things. This serves a similar purpose to what I was proposing, but at the expense of your own time, which I appreciate.

That said, other comments of yours (where you speak about the work it takes to give HN the “HN feel”) give me a thought: HN is less a link board than it is an actual, edited, journal (lack of a better word). I mean, links are submitted by users, and upvotes are used as a signal, but unlike Reddit, HN is edited. That’s a good thing, because clearly we find this site useful.