https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's better to wait until something significant happens and there is significant new information (SNI) to discuss.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
That's a pretty easy claim to make about most articles.
HN does better when it steers clear of generic discussion, the same way an exploring spacecraft does best to steer clear of the largest planets or any black holes in the vicinity.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
That goes 10x for generic ideological or political threads.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The idea that a bill proposal article is somehow going to " rarely go anywhere" and etc seems such a generic idea that you could apply to anything.
It's clear in this thread and others that content of the bill and the issues it involves is what drives the discussion, not the fact that it is just a bill proposal, and that's what should determine the quality or whatever we're determining about the discussion.
As for 'ideological' that again seems a simple way of just applying a generic stamp that could go on any topic.
These brush strokes you use are way too wide and random IMO.
Beyond that if ideology even does plays into things, that's not a reason to sweep it away. Ideology has collided with infectious disease, we still talk about it. If there's too much ideology in a thread, that just seems like a great tool for folks to use to simply derail the discussion.
Yes of course ideology and politics enter into lots of things. The question is if an article has enough substance to support an intellectually interesting discussion that doesn't end up being dominated by flamebait and boilerplate. There's no intention to sweep political or ideological topics away altogether. That's another point that's been explained many times, but I'm afraid I have to give you another one of those links to point to it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
These criteria don't seem particularly wide to me and they certainly aren't random. They've evolved out of the 13+ years of experience we've had running this place. I do get, though, that they can seem random at the level of a particular post, from the perspective of anyone who hasn't seen the dozens/hundreds/thousands of previous cases that motivate the moderation style. That's another reason why I quote those links so often - it's an attempt to show how the practices here have accrued from a large corpus of similar cases over a long time.
The main thing we're trying to avoid on HN is too much repetition. The generic topic in this case has been repeated many times over many years on HN, and since there isn't a significant new development in this case (that's the point about proposed bills), there's nothing to steer the thread in a non-repetitive direction. To my eye the comments in this one make that point quite clearly.
The reason I mentioned the links was because 'this is the policy' didn't really seem to apply when I was addressing the amorphous reasons for the policy that could apply to any number of active discussions on HN right now. I didn't doubt it was an actual policy.
But either way it's not my call, best of luck to you.
Thanks for that. I can understand not wanting to read several whole bunches of old moderation comments :)