Generic ideological tangents are off topic on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=generic%20ideological&sort=byD...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=generic%20ideological&sort=byD...
I very much appreciate all the hard work you do here, btw. HN is my favorite place to discuss things online. I also understand the difficulty of not letting the place get overrun with unproductive political debates. I just think we have to be careful to not unreasonably single out certain topics in a way that may seem confusing or arbitrary.
If it was solely the unnecessary snark and lack of good faith, then I think I understand. But by referring specific content in the comment, it becomes less clear.
Such discussions are off topic for a reason: they are repetitive. Worse, they turn into flamewars (case in point, see the replies to my comment downthread). This is emphatically not what HN is for. The value of this site—intellectual curiosity—withers under repetition and dies under attack.
Take a look at the comments through the search link I posted. There's a long history there. If you then still don't understand why we're doing this, I'd be happy to discuss it further (but you'll probably need to email hn@ycombinator.com).
We don't really need to discuss it further, but, to clarify, I think the thing that caught my eye is when a reasonable discussion naturally starts to veer towards these more difficult, ideological topics.
Those topics aren't meaningless. It is just very hard to discuss them productively on a public internet forum, as you noted. However, it is also not unexpected for productive, intellectual discussions of other issues to meaningfully brush up against these "ideological tangents" on occasion.
The part that seems a little arbitrary to me is to say that the discussion can't proceed further purely based on content alone, as opposed to instead drawing the line based on content-neutral criteria such as civility, substantiveness, novelty, etc.
But I understand that this desire may be overly idealistic in a public internet forum, and certain pragmatic lines may need to be drawn. It sounds like might be the case on HN. Again, thanks for engaging with me on this.
Such arguments are always the same and only interest a small minority of HN users who want to yell at each other while calling it "ideas". These threads get dumber and nastier as they grow, and drown out the quieter, thoughtful things we actually do want here. Therefore we have to moderate them. Intellectual curiosity is a fragile thing, like a garden that needs protecting from off-road vehicles.
Perhaps you're the rare person who really has something original to say about political ideologies, and I missed that in your HN comments. In that case I'm sorry for misinterpreting you. Nevertheless an internet forum is not the medium for such ideas—even if you're deep and original, others won't be, and the space is too constrained for all but shallow comments on grand topics. So if that's the case, you should write a book instead.
It seems that you might be unaware that the user 'dang' is a moderator.