That's great and all, but in a newsroom, when the editor changes your title, they tell you why so you can do better next time.

That is what is missing here.

That's not true at all. What newsroom did you work in that had journalists writing their own titles and expecting even a modicum of influence over the final product once it has been handed in?

I sat next to the Wired newsroom for a few years, and they certainly did it.

Doesn't history tell us that it's very common for reporters not to write their own headlines?

Getting feedback on your work is not the same as having influence over it.

A good editor will do that. It's about teaching and preparing journalists to be great.

I work in a newsroom, albeit a small one--a public radio station--and we do that.

I also have the freedom to tell my bosses "no" so I expect my newsroom is probably in the minority.

Interesting side note: We're growing in a small market (Vermont) at a time when most newsrooms are shrinking or even collapsing, especially the small markets. Sure, correlation is not causation, but I would argue that the culture plays no small part in our success.

> That's great and all, but in a newsroom, when the editor changes your title, they tell you why so you can do better next time.

I agree that would be nice. However, as you know from running a busy site, it's not always possible to give such feedback, or you'd drown under emails. I'm thinking of /r/redditrequest or any of the methods of reporting things like doxxing to the mods, which usually don't get any feedback for the user.

My interest is this: I think content needs to be edited for maximal reading potential. That in turn leads to the question as to whether Reddit/HN are more like links lists (MetaFilter, blogs) or more like discussion forums (phpBB, vbulletin, etc). By "more like" I mean as communities, not as software.

You know how we avoided this problem at reddit? We didn't edit the user's submissions. :)

I understand, but for devil's advocacy sake, that leads to other problems for the content reader, such as:

* Duplicates. Endless duplicates.

* Rejection of good content because the headline is bad.

* Essentially outsourcing this function to subreddit mods, who have only rejection at hand.

If someone mods a subreddit, and they see a submission that's perfect except the person misspelled "intimacy" in the title, they have two options only:

* Accept it as it is.

* Reject/delete it and get the user to submit again.

There's a bit of high overhead there, and less of a powerful experience for the reader. I think that matters less with Reddit's mostly 15-25 audience but is more important here.