Thanks for the timely explanation. I would maintain that substantive comments that help people quickly understand what the article is about—and what it's not about—should be allowed to rise/fall organically. If people are +1'ing it, that means they found it helpful. Doesn't that tend to indicate that others might find it helpful also?

I should say that if this down-weighting had happened simultaneous to a title change, I would feel differently. A better title would be: "Clients I Chose Not To Work With". To my ear, it's equally click-baity, but it has the benefit of accurately describing the post itself.

I hear you, and of course we change titles like that all the time. I'm not quite over the line on this one though; the objection feels a bit pedantic to me and that's not how we moderate the front page.

Also, the upvoting system isn't great for cases like this. There are certain qualities in comments that attract upvotes almost mechanically (indignation is another) and if we didn't moderate the threads, the result would be such comments at the top of every thread, and less interesting discussions. HN functions best not when it's entirely community-and-software driven, but when community, software, and moderators interact in feedback loops. Our goal is to help the community process coalesce into something more interesting than it would in a less complex system.