Intellectual curiosity depends on how repetitive a topic is. The more repetitive it is, the less curious—curiosity withers under repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
When there's a major ongoing topic (MOT), HN gets flooded with many follow-up submissions about that overall story. The test we apply in such cases is to ask whether a submission contains significant new information (SNI): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
When a follow-up story doesn't contain significant new information, it falls on the repetitive side and tends to produce repetitive, generic discussions. Those are worse for intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Worse, repetitive and generic discussions tend to devolve into flamewars. It's as if the mind resorts to conflict to amuse itself when there isn't any material for curiosity to play with: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The key thing is whether the comments in such a thread are about interesting new information contained in the new article, or whether they could be copy/pasted from any other recent thread about the topic. HN thrives on diffs: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Basically the question is: where's the SNI?
All: if any reasoning here is wrong or unclear, have a look at the above links. Then if there's still some question that hasn't been answered, I'd love to know what it is. These principles have built up over many years of operating Hacker News. The same situations and questions come up repeatedly; you'll notice that as we've posted explanations over the years, the answers have slowly been converging. That's I link so often to past explanations: in addition to giving more information, it lets readers see how the answers have developed and why they are the way they are.
The question of how to treat politics on HN is a hard puzzle. It has constraints that make a solution nearly impossible. Worse, without a solution, the site will destroy itself. My answer here (plus the links) is our best attempt at a solution. If anyone thinks they have a better solution, I'd love to hear what it is—but please familiarize yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just leave the threads alone", I've answered many times already why that won't work.
p.s. If anyone doubts that the current topic is a MOT, I pasted a dozen links to major recent threads here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902685. Look through them and you'll find plenty of generic discussion.