Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, you've convinced me that "obviously" was an overstatement. I'll take that word out and tone down that sentence. What's on topic is what gratifies intellectual curiosity. It may not gratify everyone's, but that's true of every submission. A single errant flag isn't going to get anyone penalized, but if users show a pattern of flagging intellectually substantive articles on uncommon or unexpected topics (especially…
The parent article would likely be flagged less if it had a nicer title. A title like "Was Shakespeare a Woman?" likely sets off a lot of warnings on peoples' clickbait radars, causing people to flag the submission without even reading the article.
this is one thing i hate about hacker news' policy of editing (and thus editorializing) titles and links. for one, nobody knows what you two are discussing because no one knows what the original title was, what the original change was, and how those differ from the current title. it just confuses things. and more often i can't find articles i had read earlier in the day because the title and maybe even link has changed. and all that ignores the possibility of editorializing an article's title. to me, the original title, regardless of its provocativeness, is always preferred. if there is a need to update the link, then that should be in a comment and stickied if hacker news had that feature.