> Titles are common property. The person who happens to submit something first shouldn't thereby get the right to choose the title for everyone else.

This is a strange statement.

To me, a submitter is an editor, not a robot stumbling on an interesting article by pure chance. As an editor, the submitter makes a decision about when to submit a link (the time of day matter a lot), and, yes, about how to present the link.

Every day there are posts that make it to the front page, thanks to an interesting spin in the title, and when suddenly the title gets reverted to the plain original version we wonder what this is doing on the front page.

It's also strange to state that what users complain about in an ongoing fashion, is "not that big a deal".

Anyway, there would be a simple solution to this: when the title is changed by moderators, save the submitter's title, and show both versions (one under the other, one smaller than the other).

I wrote a little script that does just that (it saves every new submission, and then when called on the page, checks if the title changed and if yes, adds the original title as a subtitle); it worked fine until HN switched to https.

I'll re-release it as a browser extension soon if anyone's interested.