Have you considered surfacing how titles will be changed when they're posted?

I'm not sure I understand your question, but we've posted countless times about this and are happy to answer about specific cases. You can find a lot of information via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and similar searches.

During the submission process where the form say a title is too long you could also be displaying how any transformations will affect it.

That shows up as soon as the submission is created, and there's an 'edit' link if you need to change it. Just don't change it in ways that break the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If it displays during the title entry process it is educating the users about the transformations that occur too. It's a positive-reinforcement loop that supplements the guidelines. It's the reason you don't have to document in the guidelines that the maximum title length is 80 characters.

The title processing logic is surprisingly complex, just as the whole issue of titles on HN is surprisingly complex. That means the code runs on the server, which would make it awkward to run during the data entry process, which of course is browser-side.

The best solution would of course be instantaneously with some javascript but if it's not CPU-taxing it would still be plenty fast to send the title to the server as the input value changes. It's not uncommon for forms to do this with username eligibility checks etc.

Hacker News, unlike most websites, likely has a very significant number of users who keep Javascript disabled.

I think they're getting at transformations that happen after submission, such as dropping initial question words and the like, not just the length restriction (which does appear).

Yup, basically this. Another idea would be to add a "please review this title that Hacker News won't let me submit with" button that would get these kinds of things in front of you sooner.

why did you switch from the mit site to twitter ? (i'm currently blocked on twitter - they want a phone number and are blocking all content till i provide one)

Can't you just log out? Or are you IP blocked?

given that they blocked me for "rules violations" (which i clearly didn't do, as it was a brand new account that had taken zero actions and my previous account was fine when i closed it) i didn't want to circumvent the block (which might have actually been against the rules) so i didn't use technical measures (which certainly would have worked). i ended up just giving them my phone number, but it's a sad reality that we've accepted all these walled gardens

There's more information there.