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With the original title, it's perfect, but after the edits its coherence is a little fractured...

Honestly I don't love HN's title edits. Why can't we have nice blog titles that start with why?

Ironic that this is one case when you don't use an apostrophe to indicate the possessing entity. I suppose the rule is possessive nouns only, not pronouns.

Correct: when it's possessive, its form of it is its not it's.

Easy mnemomic: the apostrophe is for a missing letter, I.

as a non english native, i find it incredible how many native english speakers do this mistake

If enough of us make this mistake then maybe the prescriptive half can drop the whole "possessive pronouns don't get an apostrophe" rule altogether :D.

The same goes for "alot", avoiding the use of "whom", and so on - I ain't gonna give up on them!

I think they've given up on this, it's ubiquitous. I've recently noticed that a CLIP model (a neural network for image understanding) gave me image descriptions using "it's" where "its" would have been correct. Hundreds of thousands of dollars to train the thing; no one noticed, no one cared ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also `a lot` not `alot`