This is a case where I'd argue deviating from the "official" article title is warranted, as it more clearly explains the aim behind the submission, or to what specifically the submitter wishes to draw our attention.
I would also argue that hiding "the aim behind the submission" is soft of the point, submissions should be able to stand on their own. If more context is required then a better link should be found IMO, a HN submission title is not the place for an opinion piece. Worst case scenario add a comment in your submission explaining your rationale.
I feel like that then runs afoul of HN's other guideline to prefer primary sources.
Consider the following scenario: PopularSoftware v.6.2 sneaks in a one-line mention in its changelog that the software will now proactively scan the contents of your computer. This would obviously be newsworthy and would make for a popular point of discussion for HN. How best should that be communicated in the submission? If we follow HN guidelines, the submission title should be copied from the main page, "PopularSoftware v.6.2 is released!" That doesn't really make it clear to the HN user casually scanning the front page that the submission is really trying to draw your attention to that particular, controversial bullet point.
An alternative would be promoting someone's blogpost or analysis of PopularSoftware 6.2 and its disclosure of hard-disk scanning. But as I mentioned earlier, you'd be promoting a secondary source over a primary source simply for the sake of clarity in the submission title.
I mean you've been here for quite a while judging by your profile, do you really find this to be a practical problem while browsing HN? Personally it's really a non-issue and the potential slippery slope of letting people come up with custom submission titles is not really worth it IMO.
Even if they don't, if the title is too boring they might let the story pass without doing either. A story titled simply "PopularSoftware v6.2.1 released" (it's even a x.y.1 release, which commonly means only small bug fixes) might not attract enough attention to get more than a few upvotes.
Not really. "macOS Server gets worse in 5.7.1" is a purely subjective opinion and there's no reason this personal opinion should override the actual article's title.
I personally have never used macOS server and from that context, the actual title ("Prepare for changes to macOS Server 5.7.1") makes a lot more sense.
That's different than the linked page but I think it gets across the changes that are coming.
In this particular case there's a good argument GP makes against the supplied Apple headline as it's spin.
A term cannot be accurate. I understand you're trying to suggest that "censorship" is an accurate way to describe this particular scenario, but that's your own subjective opinion, which IMO, is incorrect. Censorship necessarily implies an intentional effort to squelch a particular person or idea.
Is this bad? No. This is the whole positive and negative to active moderation.
"Changing a title" is not inherently an act of censorship because there are many reasons why a title could be changed. Changing a title might be censorship, but not always. In this case, it is NOT censorship because the title was modified based on a pre-established submission rule (i.e. from the HN guidelines "use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."), NOT due to any particular prejudice against the ideas expressed in the title.
It also seems a little strange to me that changing a title to reflect the author's actual title can somehow be construed as censorship. It seems to me that the person editorializing the title is more aptly described as a censor than the mechanism that restores the title to the original form and cadence intended by the author.