It's been a while since I've done it, but I think it's still possible, though a pain in the ass, to put custom ringtones on an iPhone. It involved renaming a .m4a audio file with to have a .m4r extension and then somehow getting it on the phone. Worth it to have the opening to "Eye of the Tiger" as a ringtone.

It's implicit that the submitter of an article thinks it's worth reading. It's not implicit that other HN users think it's worth reading. Again, HN receives a new submission every few minutes. Not every article is worth our time; there's not enough time even if they were.

Thus, the point of the summary is for the submitter to explain to other users why the article is worth reading. Moreover, HN submissions are on a very broad range of topics, so even if an article is worth reading on a specific topic, readers are not interested in every topic. Some article titles are so vague that you can't even discern the topic!

I'm not confusing them. But I would say, for example, that the HN guidelines and moderation, which come from the top, are focused more on encouraging commenters to respect each other, much less so on encouraging commenters to respect the article authors, who I guess are assumed to be not reading the comments.

> Summaries are subjective

Yes, so what? The comments on a submission are subjective too.

I still don't know who you think the "bad actors", "charlatans", and "sophists" are, how they can "invisibly rewrite history", or what you think "gamed" means, aside from getting people to click the submitted link.

The entire point of my proposal is simply that a summary of the article, longer than the article title but still relatively brief, can frequently be a better guide than the article title alone as to whether the article is worth reading. That's it. So the histrionics about rewriting history and such just seem bizarre and inexplicable to me.

> the objective nature of the original content

Objective in what way? The submitted article may itself be an opinion piece, and often is.

Anyway, nobody would be stopping you from reading the article. Quite the opposite: the point of the summary is to explain why you should read the article yourself!

Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945966 The article title is "What could have been". The article title is so extremely vague as to be useless. I have no clue what it's supposed to be about.

> it's not fair to the author

To be honest, as an author whose articles have been submitted to HN a number of times, I have a hard time believing that HN actually cares about being "fair" to the article author. To the contrary, HN has become notorious for unfairly and ignorantly tearing down article authors. You must be aware of this, yes?

I think it would be refreshing to have a summary from the submitter who, more likely than other commenters, read the article and appreciates it. As an article author, I say that I'm least worried about the submitter being unfair to me.

> We prefer to maintain an expectation that people will read the full article before commenting.

The community missed here is the people who not only don't read the article but don't comment either, who completely ignore the article, because the article title was uninformative.

I gave an example in another thread of a submission whose title is so vague as to be practically meaningless to those deciding whether to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945966

In the absence of a useful title, the only way for someone to determine whether an article is worth reading is to check the upvotes and/or the comments. But that, I think, makes the anti-summary attitude ironic, because upvotes and comments don't come from the original author. Indeed, one of the reasons that many people go to the comments before reading the article—and HN users explicitly say this—is that they want to determine whether the article is worth reading. From my perspective, a brief summary or "pitch" if you will, would encourage more people to read the article and/or discourage people from reading an article that they come back and complain about having read.

And I would say, by the way, that one of the main reasons that submitters editorialize the article title is the title itself is not particularly informative.

> tacitly endorsed by HN

I'm not sure what this means exactly. In one sense, every submission and comment on HN, even the comments from people who haven't read the article, or comments that are otherwise inaccurate, is tacitly endorsed by HN, except perhaps those that have been specifically moderated by you. Indeed, you might even say that HN tacitly endorses every article that is linked by HN!

In another sense, though, a submission, and the proposed summary of the submission is not endorsed by HN but rather by the HN user who submitted it, whose username is attached to the submission. And I don't see a problem with that. This is always the case for a website with user-submitted content. Everyone can tell the difference between the site and the user.

By the way, while a moderator is here, the person who apparently summoned you here accused me of sealioning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44948008