Incidentally, to those who complain about mods changing titles: we fix stuff like this constantly. All day long we quietly fix breakage, and every month or so we revert a title that someone was attached to, and we get an indignant mob bitching at us.
But the flip side of the loud indignant mob is the quietly indignant mob; a few days ago I submitted an item that I thought might be worthwhile, except that the best-formatted (easiest-to-read) source, nbcnews, also happened to be the one with the worst title. So, I used the title for the same article from the AP instead, and within a few minutes a moderator had mindlessly changed it to match the crappy, inflammatory title from the article.
I didn't bitch to anyone though, because it's clear that nobody's mind is going to be changed, but I wondered why HN doesn't just automatically pull the title from the submitted article. There's really no point in my putting any effort at all into a title.
obtw, a good rule of thumb in customer service is that for every complaint you get, there were 10 other people that had the same problem but didn't put the effort into telling you about it.
Any chance that every month or so a moderator makes a bad decision and the mob calls it out correctly? When did HN become about mods -vs- unwashed masses? Surely this could be solved in some way making all sides happy... (old title in parens, majority voting on title, etc.)