The current solution isn't terrible; we don't need to trust the average submitter to come up with a title that's better than the original, and the bad cases tend to get fixed by the mods eventually. Unfortunately it does mean we see clickbait titles in the stream for some time, and the clickbait gets rewarded.

We're also assuming that the article is worth reading despite the clickbait title. If an article has a seriously misleading title, that tells us something about the kind of journalism we can expect in the article itself. Ideally, I'd rather such sites never make it to HN.

Humor has IME always had a high likelihood of ending up gray (in text color) on this site.