> Implicit Downranking of Topics Around Diversity and Inclusion > Likewise, topics around diversity and inclusion in tech have gained lots of visibility over the past few years. However, despite these discussions not being off-topic, they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Unfortunately. (Moderators occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although it rarely sticks).

This is a very interesting subject. I would dare say that the majority of technologists (by pure numbers) find the human, philosophical, and psychological impacts of technology less interesting than the pure technical considerations. (Older and more senior technologists gravitate in the opposite direction)

Yet, the most interesting and in-depth hackernews discussions directly touch up on privacy, censorship, employee motivation, the entrepreneurial mindset, managerial skills and lack therefor, regulation, corporate responsibility. All of these are strictly "on-topic" by the definition on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

> 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.

So clearly, this community is passionate and interested in a wide range of "fuzzy" non-STEM subjects.

Yet when it comes to D&I, the community is primarily disinterested and not intellectually curious, or has already concluded that anyone who IS interested is pushing a purely "political" agenda. Therefore, the only "interesting" stories that get upvoted are those that butt against the current cultural movement (e.g. defending James Damore, RMS, etc).

I am personally very intellectually curious about this very pattern, but I appear to be in the minority.

I wonder if people on HackerNews are aware that a huge percentage of female and minority engineers that I know find the HN community discussions completely disreputable and unappealing. And it's a direct consequence of how they treat these subjects as "uninteresting" and "off topic", because to the dominant in-group these subjects are just not relevant.

Personally, as a technologist, a "hacker" (Whatever that may mean, but i identify strongly with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture), I consider this blind spot in this community a "bug". I don't know if it's a fixable one, as any attempts to mitigate it would clearly be perceived as intrusion and a restriction on the individual freedoms of expression. But the status quo is the status quo, to the point that even this manual of undocumented "features and behaviours" has to call it out.