Sorry for the delay in replying. I think you have a stronger case about that example. Most likely we changed the title to make it less baity—"In Defense of" doesn't really add much information except "Fight", and that's a bad way to prime a thread.
Having now read more of the article, though, I agree with you that the title edit changed the focus in a misleading way. I've changed it back now. Maybe "The simplicity of OpenStreetMap's data model", or something like that, might have been an ok compromise, but it's too late to matter.
Moderation is guesswork. Inevitably, we guess wrong sometimes. The best thing is for users to tell us when we've got something wrong, because then we can correct it. In the future, if you would let us know at hn@ycombinator.com instead of posting in the thread, where we're unlikely to see it, we can correct things while the thread is still live. We do that all the time (many times a day), but we can't correct mistakes we don't know about!
> Most likely we changed the title to make it less baity—"In Defense of" doesn't really add much information except "Fight", and that's a bad way to prime a thread.
Such words also signals value, since they signal that someone has something significant to contribute to the conversation. For an extensive discussion about how such words signal value, see Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively:
> The benefits of simplicity in OpenStreetMap's data model
That would have been a great edit. I won't bother doing it now since it's too late to matter, but if you come up with any of those in the future, I'd love to hear about them.
Having now read more of the article, though, I agree with you that the title edit changed the focus in a misleading way. I've changed it back now. Maybe "The simplicity of OpenStreetMap's data model", or something like that, might have been an ok compromise, but it's too late to matter.
Moderation is guesswork. Inevitably, we guess wrong sometimes. The best thing is for users to tell us when we've got something wrong, because then we can correct it. In the future, if you would let us know at hn@ycombinator.com instead of posting in the thread, where we're unlikely to see it, we can correct things while the thread is still live. We do that all the time (many times a day), but we can't correct mistakes we don't know about!