Can mods stop censoring the Arrington controversy?
One thing we can [I hope] agree on is that, from a bureaucratic standpoint, the moderators' likely motivation for removing the stories is true, it's a: not technical or intellectually stimulating and b: likely to generate a lot of attention that detracts from such material on the front page. But the same could be said for, say, the death of Steve Jobs. If we can mourn Steve Jobs for a week, we can ponder the Arrington accusations for a couple hours. In other words, using this bureaucratic justification for removing those stories, whose relevance is to the community, is inconsistent with the way HN is typically run, and thus intellectually dishonest, something that good hackers should not like.
In other words, censoring these stories is a form of lying.
I'd also like to say that while a controversy of this nature can generate a lot of bad discussion, it can also generate good discussion: I'm willing to bet it's possible for the average HN'ers to contribute in a constructive manner on a topic like this if they really want to. Or, to be more precise: one should not be afraid to discuss a controversy iff they can contribute to the discussion in a way that is not causal, i.e. intended to affect the outcome. That is a nice rule to keep in mind: pretend what you're saying doesn't matter before you say it.
Dishonesty, Kant tells us, results from using the audience to achieve your aims. So don't do that.
The point of the above two paragraphs is hopefully to inspire moderators not to censor future controversies, either. I don't expect to keep every comment civil: my belief is that large parts of the discussion can be civil and useful enough that we can learn from them. We've done that before, and, censorship notwithstanding, we can do it again.