Well, the reason I posted this today is because I posted a link to house.gov where you could look up the personal finances/investments of each Congressional representative. I also posted the link to the Senate version. They must be highly interesting to hackers because both links immediately got lots of upvotes -- about 30 for the HoR version and about 10 for the Senate version, within the first hour.
My link was titled "House of Representatives Personal Finances" because I thought it was more descriptive than "Financial Disclosure Reports Database" which says neither whose info is being disclosed or what type of financial info it is. I carefully considered and tried to choose a title that was more descriptive but NOT clickbait.
After getting over 30 upvotes and reaching spot #5 on the frontpage, one of the moderators changed the title to be the on-page title. I dunno if my post was also hit with some kind of voting-ring penalty or changed-title penalty or something else, but almost immediately it dropped to spot #31 (on page 2). Right next to a post that had the same number of upvotes but was 8 hours old instead of 1 hour old.
So maybe it didn't bomb because of the worse (original) title, maybe there was some kind of penalty going on as well that could explain it. But after the title changed and it immediately went from spot #5 to spot #31, it then in the last couple of hours has received only 1 additional comment and no additional upvotes, and now I can't even find the post without going to my profile page and looking at my history.
That's the example that happened this morning that was the proximate cause of this Ask HN post, but it has been on my mind for some time as I have seen it happen to other good posts too, where the title had been changed by the submitter to something more descriptive, then eventually a mod sees it and changes it to the author's title and suddenly there's a lack of interest in it and it rapidly gets pulled into the undercurrent.
EDIT: Forgot to include the actual link, it's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607463
Wish I had other examples to show you, but although I've seen this happen several times in the last couple of months, it's not a daily thing and I never thought to record the links. But then I'm not on HN all day so the frequency I'm sure is higher than my own personal witnessing of it