Certainly we can and do talk about stuff like this. The issue is the other way around: there have been tons of threads about topics just like this already. That leads to having the same discussion over and over again. Since the core principle of HN is intellectual curiosity, it's important to avoid too much repetition (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). That's particularly important when it's repetition of a high-indignation topic, since indignation shuts down curiosity even faster than repetition does.

BigTech bannage in the eras of Trump and Covid is a classic Major Ongoing Topic (MOT). Such topics have a way of appearing over and over again and getting upvoted a lot, because people feel strongly about them. The problem is that there's little curiosity value to be gained from having them repeat so much—they tend to be generic and to metastasize into flamewars. Yet sometimes the MOT mutates in an interesting way. What's best for HN is if the interesting milestones in a MOT saga get front page threads, but not all the garden-variety instances.

Over the years, we worked out a heuristic for this which turns out to work well: it's called SNI (Significant New Information). Each time there's SNI, it makes sense to have a fresh discussion because there's something fresh to discuss. Each time there isn't SNI, it makes sense not to have a frontpage discussion, because that discussion has already taken place, usually many times. We came up with this approach after the Snowden MOT of 2013, in which users were rightly complaining when one article after another would show up on the front page repeating things that had already been reported and discussed.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Moderators haven't touched this post, btw—users flagged it. We sometimes turn off flags when the article is interesting, contains SNI, and is able to support a substantive HN thread. But I don't think this story really clears that bar. It's a yet-another case in a long sequence. People already know how they feel about it and even already know what they have to say about it. That makes for HN badness.