I don't think that's happening. Here are the Chesterton's Fence stories that have made HN's front page:

Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 - March 2020 (85 comments)

The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 - Nov 2016 (26 comments)

The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 - May 2016 (2 comments)

There was also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196731, which was on the front page for 5 minutes before we buried it.

It's true that it's an internet cliché though—so much so that Chesterton seems in danger of turning into his fence.

Before we stop frontpaging articles about Chesterton's fence, we must first understand why the articles are being frontpaged to begin with.

Its downstream of the collective trauma experienced by those who as a result insist on changing everything all the time, often with no good reason.

What I tend to notice about this is how easily people seem to fall on both sides of this fence (pun slightly intended). People can be annoyed that a change broke their workflow (why didn't anyone bother to find out if this was in use), while simultaneously pushing to change other things without applying Chesterton's Fence (we should just do ... to solve this problem).

Like so many logical constructs, it really just seems to exist so we can apply it when we are frustrated, not in our day to day decision making.

It's not trauma, it's fear of what would happen if there weren't articles on HN about Chesterton's fence a few times a year.

I think it's cheekier than that. It's a deliberate attempt to watch people miss points, argue, and split hairs over the mildest of mild rules of thumb.

Perhaps it is the trauma of non-consensual changes in software and especially user interfaces that we are forced to deal with regularly?

I expect it's a frequent side-effect of working on large systems with many interdependencies.

Young developers often propose large-scale rewrites with little sense of the costs or risks involved. Changing old code often has unintended side-effects.

?? This phenomenon applies to every topic on the front page. We like to rehash the same concepts and subjects over and over.

Things get reposted all the time, is there something particularly odious about Chesterton's Fence?

must be the second order effects of said trauma