I submitted this link to HN with the Reddit title in quotes. Not sure why the quotes were removed, but I want to clarify that I am not the Reddit post author.

It's never been the case that an HN title like this is assumed to be a statement by the submitter.

We always match the HN title to the original post's title, unless it's misleading or linkbait, as per the guidelines. Quotation marks are generally superfluous except, I think, if the article is about a quote.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html