When the topic comes up on /r/linux, the thread gets locked because no fruitful discussion can come of "He wasn't that bad!"/"Yes he was!"/"No, he wasn't!" ad nauseam.
That's why the flaggings happen here, too.
That's why the flaggings happen here, too.
It just feels.. eh.
When there's a major ongoing topic, one important test is whether there's SNI (Significant New Information) in a submission—or just a follow-up that's continuing the same discussion. If there's no SNI, chances are high that the discussion will be a repeat, and when the topic is highly polarized, you'll get a repeat of the same flamewar. That's what we really don't want here, so we downweight such follow-ups.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
These principles are well-established on HN and have nothing specifically to do with Stallman, let alone whatever opinions the mods have or don't have. You'll see the same patterns about any major ongoing topic that's highly divisive. Assange stories, for example, are pretty much an exact parallel.
Your comment suggests you may feel like there's a bias in which opinions are being "allowed" - that's not the case. See my explanation above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636. It's all too easy to feel like the local authorities are biased against your view, but that perception is in the eye of the beholder—i.e. it's rooted in cognitive biases, such as the one where people notice the cases they dislike and overlook the others (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
Some example topics being US/China geopolitics or the story about "men clamming up" around women.
Fruitful discussion can be made in both of these but it very often is not.
> Do you think that some topics are more trouble than they are worth?
This is too generic a question to answer meaningfully. Probably, but it's more a question of whether a given submission is intellectually interesting and capable of supporting a substantive discussion.
> Some example topics being US/China geopolitics or the story about "men clamming up" around women.
You're conflating two different categories there. One (US/China geopolitics) is one of the most common flamewar topics that gets posted to HN, with discussions getting asymptotically worse, past the point where it's not clear that the forum can handle it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26643703
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26630159
The other was a specific article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918) on a specific topic that really hasn't had much attention. I spent the better part of a day moderating the latter. I don't know if that answers your question or not but from my perspective it's the same principles being applied in all cases.
One important thing to realize is that we're trying to optimize HN for just one thing, which is curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... A lot of moderation calls that might seem weird or inconsistent make a lot of sense once you understand the chain of derivation from that rule.