Who know, maybe they're trying to distance themselves from the privacy disaster, but I doubt anyone at YC or HN is smart enough to read the room on Flock.

Which room? The one paying them millions to spy on people? Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

I see less of it now across the board but note that this headline was almost certainly created by the story's submitter; it's not like there's an automated process to apply the label.

There are definitely some automatic formatting rules for titles though.

E.g. capitalization or one that removes any "How" from the beginning of a title. When I wanted to submit "How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU" I had to edit it after posting or it would have said "Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU", which doesn't make any sense.

How does that not make any sense? It turns into a statement. If it no longer makes sense, the original title was bad clickbait, no?

Titles should be descriptive and in this example the blog is doing a deep dive into how the tech actually works. So the content isn't about that "Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU", but about how it did so.

As far as I can tell this is supposed to catch "How to" titles, where it totally makes sense though. I guess there is an exception to every rule though.

Likely the person didn't know they were part of YC (I didn't).