How much advantage does that really provide?

If I share an HN link among my Facebook friends, as I sometimes do, a snippet of the discussion is shown, and that (besides my tagline to the submitted link) lets people know what to expect. If I share a link in an email, I generally introduce it to the recipients. What is the use case for changing the link structure of Hacker News? I'm not sure that "immediately clear" is guaranteed by all of the user-submitted titles here, for example.

I thought about it today while writing a google doc where I was adding HN links - I believe having this would make all those clearer. Though I understand that adding commentary for all links is a solution there.

Also, this would make it much easier to decipher the links I have sprinkled through various notes in Evernote.

You can give human-readable text to links in a Google Doc - that lets you choose your own title, which would undoubtedly be more readable than a url-safe string.

Ironically, I find this would be most useful when including links to previous HN discussions on Hacker News itself, because this is one of the few sites that doesn't let you put in human-readable text for the links you include.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5464028&title=testi... - you can just hack it in. maybe someone could put together a simple bookmarklet to get the title appended to the url

Oh well… Here is a simple bookmarklet that will append a slug to the url:

    javascript:history.pushState({}, document.title, document.URL + "&title=" + document.querySelector('.title a').innerText.toLowerCase().replace(/[^\w ]+/g,'').replace(/ +/g,'-'))

I think this is done deliberately -- as to not show up on as many google searches as the site would be showing up otherwise.