I agree with the mocking and immediately understood the reference. I was saying it's unfortunate because as a headline on HN, it lacks what I would call critical info to get people interested in clicking and reading.

I think it could get real traction on HN if there were a blog post on Brave summarizing the paper in a few paragraphs with a title something closer to:

Goggles: User Generated Search Rankings and Filters that you can subscribe to.

Why does it mock WaPo?

That's a good thing in my book.

what degree of seriousness would be excessive for "democracy dies in darkness"?