Ah, thank you. That's what I assumed the policy was, but I wasn't sure if it was implicit or explicit. Now I know.
I guess the point I'm attempting to argue is that this particular policy is suboptimal and should be changed. Of course, when a policy or consensus exists, we should follow it. When it's a bad policy, we should follow it until we change it or remove it. I think we should change this.
My position basically boils down to a worse-is-better argument. I think the desire to maximize accuracy with original titles actually harms the conversation more than inaccuracies and editorializing in information-packed summaries.
What matters to me in this case is the signal-to-noise ratio, not the absolute level of noise in the data. Original titles can be "cleaner" and less noisy, but they also have relatively little information, or signal. I would rather have twice the noise if it gives me three times the signal.
I even see the noise as useful in a way. It adds color. Even when a title is inaccurate, it's sometimes interesting to think about how or why it is inaccurate. A little mess never killed anybody, and can even keep us healthy. Ultimately, if I'm so busy I don't have enough time to be occasionally mislead by a click-bait title, then I don't really have time to spend on HN in the first place.
I think the right way to deal with inaccurate titles is either to simply ignore them, or maybe to downvote them and to upvote duplicate posts with better titles. But won't HN then turn into reddit? I don't think so.
See, I think we try to fix too many things with laws where we should instead use social pressure. The reason that Americans don't litter very much isn't that it's now a ticketable offense. It's that we have decided that litterers are idiots and everybody hates them. The reason many subreddits are cesspools isn't the lack of rules, it's that they're populated by people who haven't collectively figured out a better way to behave -- or who don't particularly value the benefits of that different behavior. Adding a new rule won't fix anything if people don't understand and accept the purpose behind the rule. And if they understand the purpose, they usually don't need the rule.
Someone could argue that HN is something of a cesspool because so many comment threads go off topic. Like this one. Some people despise that. In general, though, HN users generally seem to appreciate an off-topic conversation so long as it's adding value. What we don't approve of is comments that don't add value. But, we don't need rules for that. It's just our commonly accepted behavior. Other groups have different values, and that's ok.
