[Country] did [bad thing] that affected [everyone/other countries]
It's to the point that there's typically limited discussion about the topic itself and a lot of back and forth whataboutism.
Also, HN finds usage of “whataboutism” a cliche perpetuated by The Last Week Tonight (John Oliver).
It is whataboutism. I don’t give a shit if it was perpetuated by some TV show. What matters is that HN needs to stop comparisons and distracting the conversation to historical artifacts “oh look, US engaged in Slavery 150 years ago so it is unfair to criticize working conditions at Foxconn”.
We need to stop doing this guys.
tl;dr HN is great at some things, and for the rest is just as good or bad as the rest of the internet, just with less humor and self-awareness.
There are subreddits that are higher quality for specific topics, but you have to go hunting to find them.
Of course if you compare HN to /politics then HN is vastly superior, but then if you compare the average non-technical thread here to anything in /science HN comes off the worse for it. Even putting aside ideological pissing matches bikeshedding, semantic arguments and language wars, you get a lot of weird self-help stuff here that would be funny if people weren’t so desperately sincere about it.