There are already forums in which engagement is the key metric. The reason this place is valuable is because it has guidelines that prevent it from becoming that. I used to think that that was also the aspiration of the moderators - that they were happy to sacrifice "engagement" for encouraging the audience to which they wanted to appeal. This certainly seems to be their revealed preference when admonishing commenters not to be snarky or mean. Unfortunately, though they see these specks of sawdust clearly, they have no real explanation why the log of divisive, political posts are not dead at submission. Behold the triumph of tone over substance.

Maybe my memory is faulty or maybe I was less interested in the off-topic posts, but I thought that, in the past, there used to less bending the knee to the mob and more appealing to the stated guidelines.

It is not a community-enhancing action to publish guidelines and make exceptions because it's what a mob wants. That's not what moderating is. If the overriding guideline is engagement, then fine; say that and eliminate the other superfluous ones. It will save a lot of space on the Guidelines page and people coming here will understand that it is r/hn.

So: 1. Disallowing posts like these is worth it in order to promote the goals often expressed by the moderators for this site and 2. It does not require a narrow interpretation of the guidelines to conclude that posts similar to these violate all the guidelines. Let's see what happens with this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45681400