A lot of the value of "more transparency" just comes from "if the title is changed, make certain the old title is also visible from the comments page, so people don't freak out". One time someone submitted a link to a YouTube video of a panel discussion involving Linus Torvalds where he explicitly gave NVIDIA both the finger and the F-word. The link was a link directly to the paragraph in the video where it happened, and the title was clear that that is what was being linked.

Upvoted to the front page, holding there for hours, people were having a discussion about the appropriateness of swearing in this context, the extent to which it was a joke, and about how NVIDIA has treated the Linux community. And, of course, then the title changed: it got reverted to something like "Random Panel from Random Conference".

Now, everyone was really confused: the comments were all concentrating on this one moment in an hour long video (linked to semi-directly, but still like 30 seconds after the link), and freaking out about how people were so uptight and shouldn't be concentrating on that, and that there was all of this other content there.

When the title changes, it drastically changes the character of the discussion: while this website is also a link aggregator, I know of very few people who believe that that is its value; instead, people like Hacker News because of the comments: it is a discussion forum. You can't just change the title of the discussion forum while people are actively discussing things without causing a catastrophic situation.

This is thereby what I mean by "transparency": I don't mean a moderator spending even an extra 30 seconds explaining "why" something happened... I just mean that the site needs to make it clear that something did happen, or these massive arguments break out and a bunch of people are left unhappy and angry. As long as title changes are going to happen to discussion threads that already have hundreds of comments, you at least need to have a boolean "title changed" notice.

That aside, the "nuance" aspect (which I think is even more important than the "transparency" part, as you might just decide "old posts should never have their title changed" and the transparency is less important) would probably require more time from the moderators. I am not certain how to get around that: I think moderation fundamentally requires nuance.

edited my comment

There just need to be enough watchdogs.

A very simple solution would be that titles can be flagged by the community. Example below:

  submission X by kdzsb 22 minutes ago | flag title | flag discussion | 9 comments

Moderators would simply edit flagged bad titles. Rather than having them to watch all titles (old rules) or no titles at all (new rules).

> Yes, more power to the community. Wikipedia is still alive despite its massive openness. There just need to be enough trusted watchdogs.

Wikipedia has enormous meta community, and it's likely that such a huge amount of meta is toxic.

Minor point: flag discussion should probably be flag submission. The current flag action is more for flagging a submission not suitable for HN rather than flagging the discussion around it. Those two things are different.

Yes, that is minor but still important. Having 3 options: flag submission and flag discussion and flag title might be too much.

That's up to the admins to decide what needs more often to be managed, the submission or the discussion. Or it could be named:

    flag title | flag submission/discussion