Titles are often tricky. We only have about 75 characters (including spaces!) to work with. That pushes us to abbreviate and simplify. It's not only an online challenge; book titles must be similarly brief and grabby. An essay/book title can't contain all the subtlety of the essay/book; if it can, the whole thing should have been a tweet.

You already know this, but for the benefit of those who don't know: In your essay (including the title), the subtlety was in the word "for," as in, what it means to "vote for someone," so you had to put that phrase in the title, as you did. You could have put "for" in scarequotes to show that you were problematizing the word, but that title might have attracted a different audience — and some readers would still have been mad! Alternatively, you could have gone with a philosophical-sounding title, like: "What does it mean to vote for someone?" But (speaking from experience) no one clicks on abstract philosophical titles about word meanings if there's no reference to personal stakes like "I" and "Kamala."

Yes, some (non-)"readers" comment without reading. I wish there were a term for the interactive non-reader.

Recently I struggled with a title for one of my own stories. I originally tried something like:

I Have Trouble Writing My Résumé, So I’ve Hired Website Designers

This attracted feedback like: If you have trouble doing X thing, you should hire specialists in X thing, not people who specialize in something entirely different! I'd hoped that people would realize that I knew this obvious general principle and that my apparent subversion of it would simply be a hook for them to read my story.

(The point of my story was that, over two decades, I've learned I don't need a traditionally conceived, one-page, corporate-style résumé but I do need a website.)

I tweaked the title. The current version is:

Writing My Résumé Has Always Felt Tough. I’ve Hired Website Designers

This amounted to a backpedal: stating my feeling of having a problem rather than asserting I ever had a problem. Also, I removed the "so", which implied "A Therefore B," as I want people to see the two statements alongside each other, "A and B," without overthinking the connection and trying to "solve" my "problem" for me before they read my explanation. No one needs to solve a personal problem that I present in a title! I've probably already thought about it, and that's what my essay is going to talk about!