You could also look for meta tags and social media (facebook, twitter, etc) tags, and probably build a decent profile for most sites[0].  It can be done fairly reliably, and would work well for any site that actually cares about its social media presence, but the end result is still no better for low quality titles and linkbait. To guarantee quality, HN would have to either send all submissions through a mod queue or have an interstitial preview page to let the user add or edit metadata before submission. That, functionally, is just a more complication version of looking at the article and pasting in the title.<p>[0]shameless plug of my own work: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kennethrapp&#x2F;embedbug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kennethrapp&#x2F;embedbug</a>