Let me answer that bit first. Most good HN threads are "niche", meaning they are about things far less important than major events. This is on purpose, because if a story's importance were the criterion for HN's front page, then HN would be a current affairs site, and that is definitely not its mandate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). One could even say that HN is more for unimportant things, as long as they gratify intellectual curiosity, but the most accurate way to put it is that importance alone is not a criterion.

A certain amount of political overlap has always been part of the mix (that's why the site guidelines say "most" and "probably" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426), but we're careful not to let that part get too large, because we want to preserve HN for its intended purpose.

Here are some links that point to lots of past explanations about this:

some political overlap is ok, but only some - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

not a current affairs site - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

optimizing for curiosity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

not burning to a crisp - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If you review the first part of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and then take a look at these links, and still have a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

> 1750 comments, why is it #25 on HN?

This is answered in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, but I'll expand on what it says there.

Number of comments doesn't make a thread rank higher on HN. Upvotes make it rank higher, and flags make it rank lower. At this moment the balance between upvotes and flags on this story (and other factors, like the time of submission) combine to rank it at #23 or so.

HN's front page is a product of 3 things: community moderation (e.g. upvotes, flags), software moderation (e.g. flamewar detector) and moderator action (e.g. turning off flags, downweighting, or selecting posts for the SCP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).

In this case, community moderation was removing the story from the front page altogether (because flags were dominating upvotes). I overrode that by turning off the flags. Why? Because whatever else one says about this story, it is an interesting new phenomenon (a phrase from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). It may even be unprecedented.

However, I didn't turn off the flags to such a degree that the thread would be at #1 because it is not in HN's interest to have a divisive, indignant, and bellicose topic at the top of the front page. That would send the wrong message about what this site is for. Having this thread on the front page, but lower down, sends an accurate message about what this site is for. (As for what it is and isn't for—that is covered in the links I listed above.)

Another way of putting this is that while it's in HN's interest to have occasional threads on topics like this, it's important that the flames not burn so hot as to risk burning the site to a crisp. After the 'crisp' would come scorched earth, which is not interesting—it would do no good for HN to end up there. It's true that this tends to be the default fate of internet forums, but HN has right from the beginning (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html) been an experiment in trying to stave that fate off for as long as possible.

scorched earth is not interesting - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

stave that off - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

Since I’ve discovered active, I actually look at it first to find stuff that got pushed off the front page while I was not looking at HN.

I appreciate the goal of the front page algo quite a bit, but sometimes it pushes interesting stuff off the front page very aggressively if I am not refreshing HN throughout the day.