The headline should really be changed to something neutral.
YC startups already get tons of free press and PR by virtue that their investor controls HN. I thought it would be nice to highlight another founder's startup as well.
To explain, the original title of the post was "Duck Duck Go makes Time Magazine's top 50 sites of the year"
Personally, I feel that Gabriel contributes more to HN content and startup culture than the AirBnb, Hipmunk or Instapaper founders combined. And, that's not to detract at all from the great work those other startups have done.
The reason that I highlighted Duck Duck Go,and Gabriel, was because he in particular, has done something amazing: he's boot strapped a search engine essentially by himself to 8M unique searches a month.
He's also taken things like search privacy, and tithing revenues to Open Source projects, and brought them to the forefront of discussion. His blog also has a _ton of great content on it, especially his series on traction is amazing.
The original title got 10 votes in the first 5 minutes after I posted it. That Duck Duck Go doesn't get some of the kudos they have coming to them is disappointing.
"Personally, I feel that Gabriel contributes more to HN content and startup culture than the AirBnb, Hipmunk or Instapaper founders combined."
...and you're obviously free to express your opinion in the thread. But it's never been fair game to editorialize the headlines on story submissions here. (And for what it's worth, I think it was a fairly classy move that the editor didn't change the link/headline to emphasize the YC companies.)
DDG and Gabriel pop up on the front page of HN on a regular basis. They get plenty of attention here without having to slight the other 49 websites in this list.
But it's never been fair game to editorialize the headlines on story submissions here.
I don't understand your comment about editorializing headlines. The process of editorializing is making changes after the copy has been submitted. And, that's what happened to both the headline and original url that I submitted.
I submitted a link to this url[1] via bookmarklet. I trimmed extra headline cruft, and clicked "submit". The community upvoted it to #1, after you posted your comment, an unknown mod changed/editorialized the headline to remove references to DDG, and changed the url to this[2], which is pretty crap content IMHO, that I would never submit. I don't get that.
I'll stop this meta discussion, because it's really not that productive and uninteresting.
"If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."
I think a blog post along the lines of "Several regular HN members made it into Time Magazine's Top 50" in follow up to a single link to DDG making it in fits within the guidelines, but to each their own.
All I'm saying is that, this is obviously something that people were interested to know about, if you're complaining that coverage didn't extend to others you think are just as important, then write about it on your own blog and submit that
Slashdot's wrapper commentary hasn't been clever in quite some time, unfortunately. I had a very low uid there, and witnessed the decline firsthand. Count me in as someone concerned about editorialized headlines at HN -- I really don't want to see it go the same direction as /.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...
...and AirBnB:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...
The Instapaper guy is a long-time HN contributor, as well:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...
The headline should really be changed to something neutral.