Why is this even on Hacker News? Does the majority of readers here have the expertise to comment on the matter?
"What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
People are avoiding their own responsibility and don't like when others exercise it. Since I can only guess anyway, that's my guess. What I know for a fact is that the reasons against such a topic simply being where the interest of people puts it, do not hold water, that is, are always selectively applied. That in itself is intellectually interesting, but we are not allowed to personally question posters on HN too much, even when it's done it's barely rewarded with an honest reply, so we aren't intellectuals enough for that stuff. It's pointless to talk about the aggregate of a group when individuals remain opaque, so the whole subject is simply beyond our reach, as intellectually stimulating and important as it may be.
We should know what a double standard is though: If we can pretend wiggly lines satisfy our intellectual curiosity, we can take note of a country that already build massive concentration camps to "re-educate" millions of muslims now does this. We can also take note of the comments welcoming it, and ponder those. But again, that's mostly homework, we don't have the culture capable of doing this as a "community" apparently. That's a "flamewar" or whatever. We don't like growing pains, so we won't grow, that is pretty much settled.
Which is arbitrarily decided on a case by case basis. It seems stuff just gets flagged off the front page by users, and sometimes it has the [flagged] thing, sometimes it doesn't.
People can already hide topics from the front page for themselves, and blissfully ignore them. What is the point of flagging things, are there limits or can people just flag until you arbitrarily take that ability away, where is the accountability? How is taking away the ability of others to speak altogether better than the possibility of some cussing or other things that are harmful to good faith communication?
It may be harder for people to remain civil around lethally serious subjects, but it's not impossible -- and it's not fair to punish everybody, to let random people punish everybody, because you predict what would happen otherwise. It's like a stone that keeps tigers away, on steroids even:
> If we did it any other way, HN would destroy itself.
Any other way? That "way" is still a black box. So this is a super tight rope, and left and right is utter destruction? What does "destroy itself" mean, that the server would vanish? Or that it would "bleed" from one topic into another, and suddenly people are also more irate about wiggly lines?
And of course, if you actually believe that claim, then you can't even make any changes, you can't try it out, because then HN would destroy itself. How perfectly circular.
How do you know the opposite isn't true, that if things are arbitrarily suppressed, it leads to a bad atmosphere and grudges, and people get tempted to bring up a topic when it's not actually the topic?
Flamewars destroy intellectual curiosity, so we have to moderate them. If we didn't, they would grow until they consumed everything. That would drive away the users who are here for curiosity. That's what I meant about the site destroying itself.
Curiosity as a motivation on the internet is vulnerable—it doesn't scale. That forces us to intervene in various ways, some of which appear arbitrary at times, if only because providing full explanations of every case would take lifetimes. But people are always welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask for clarification. What we can't do is not intervene at all and just surrender to internet default, because that would be giving up on the site mandate.
We moderate HN to mitigate the worst aspects of this, but there's no hope of eliminating it. HN is controlled by its community. All that moderation can do is adjust the margins.
I suppose macro trends would also explain why black social issues always get flagged on HN as well.