The “minimum” reasonable thing to do would have been to leave the thread alone if it is in fact your policy to moderate YC threads less than usual.
Can you point to some non-YC posts that you have explicitly removed references to breaking the law from?
It is, in fact, breaking the law to list NYC jobs without providing salary range in the same way that it is breaking the law to jaywalk or piss on the subway. Do you find references to those laws to be salacious and sensational?
It was a mundane observation that these companies were breaking the law in the same way that it is a mundane observation that editing a title to obscure that gives the impression that it was not motivated by some sort of stoic adherence to some objective ideal.
Was “TikTok is an illegal fork of OBS” a sensational, salacious title?
I admit it was a lot of words, but I believe that lot of words already answered most of your points. As for the rest...I generally haven't found it to be a good use of time to answer that sort of cross-examination. The bulk of the community seems quite happy when we explain our thinking in good faith and don't do anything too extreme, but the cross-examiner is usually impossible to satisfy. I'm not talking about you here! but in my past experience, patiently answering a cross-examination usually only produces a longer cross-examination. I'd rather spend those resources making HN better for the rest of the community.
But you did get me curious to see if I could find a past example of this kind of title edit. I did find one from earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30680267. We changed "Google Fi Illegally Bricked My iPhone 11 Pro Max" to "Google Fi bricked my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020)" That's a typical example of HN moderation because we not only took out the sensational/disputable word, we also added the year—which besides being a normal edit, has the side effect of damping the riler-upper aspect. (The internet only likes to get angry about fresh things.)
Re the Tiktok bit, you seem to be asking about this post: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 - Dec 2021. I couldn't find any record of us moderating that post, so my first thought was that perhaps we just didn't see it. But I commented several times in the thread, so that can't be it either. Given that https://twitter.com/Naaackers/status/1471494415306788870 was exactly the sort of riler-upper that we routinely downweight, and in this case neglected to, my guess is that I was too busy in the comments and forgot to look at the article.
In a case like that, it would be normal to add a question mark as a way of making the title more neutral. We did that, for example, here: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33343681 - Oct 2022 (246 comments)
Now I have added another lot of words. I hope some of this is useful!
The “minimum” reasonable thing to do would have been to leave the thread alone if it is in fact your policy to moderate YC threads less than usual.
Can you point to some non-YC posts that you have explicitly removed references to breaking the law from?
It is, in fact, breaking the law to list NYC jobs without providing salary range in the same way that it is breaking the law to jaywalk or piss on the subway. Do you find references to those laws to be salacious and sensational?
It was a mundane observation that these companies were breaking the law in the same way that it is a mundane observation that editing a title to obscure that gives the impression that it was not motivated by some sort of stoic adherence to some objective ideal.
Was “TikTok is an illegal fork of OBS” a sensational, salacious title?