> it's not fair to the author
To be honest, as an author whose articles have been submitted to HN a number of times, I have a hard time believing that HN actually cares about being "fair" to the article author. To the contrary, HN has become notorious for unfairly and ignorantly tearing down article authors. You must be aware of this, yes?
I think it would be refreshing to have a summary from the submitter who, more likely than other commenters, read the article and appreciates it. As an article author, I say that I'm least worried about the submitter being unfair to me.
> We prefer to maintain an expectation that people will read the full article before commenting.
The community missed here is the people who not only don't read the article but don't comment either, who completely ignore the article, because the article title was uninformative.
I gave an example in another thread of a submission whose title is so vague as to be practically meaningless to those deciding whether to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945966
In the absence of a useful title, the only way for someone to determine whether an article is worth reading is to check the upvotes and/or the comments. But that, I think, makes the anti-summary attitude ironic, because upvotes and comments don't come from the original author. Indeed, one of the reasons that many people go to the comments before reading the article—and HN users explicitly say this—is that they want to determine whether the article is worth reading. From my perspective, a brief summary or "pitch" if you will, would encourage more people to read the article and/or discourage people from reading an article that they come back and complain about having read.
And I would say, by the way, that one of the main reasons that submitters editorialize the article title is the title itself is not particularly informative.
> tacitly endorsed by HN
I'm not sure what this means exactly. In one sense, every submission and comment on HN, even the comments from people who haven't read the article, or comments that are otherwise inaccurate, is tacitly endorsed by HN, except perhaps those that have been specifically moderated by you. Indeed, you might even say that HN tacitly endorses every article that is linked by HN!
In another sense, though, a submission, and the proposed summary of the submission is not endorsed by HN but rather by the HN user who submitted it, whose username is attached to the submission. And I don't see a problem with that. This is always the case for a website with user-submitted content. Everyone can tell the difference between the site and the user.
By the way, while a moderator is here, the person who apparently summoned you here accused me of sealioning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44948008