Because these sorts of topics are controversial and the mod policy is to remove topics which are likely to result in people talking past each other. From the g

Because these sorts of topics are controversial and the mod policy is to remove topics which are likely to result in people talking past each other. From the guidelines [1] : > Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for. I don't agree that these posts should be removed, they're not offensive and they don't incite hatred or violence. If people want to get in a flamewar, that's their business. If you don't want to be involved in the discussion, you can just avoid it. This form of moderation doesn't provide people the opportunity to try and deal with controversial discussions in a constructive way, it assumes that this is impossible and that preventing them from arising in the first place is a better solution. In terms of this post specifically, I think it is quite newsworthy because Rich Salz is a major contributor [2] . [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://github.com/openssl/openssl/graphs/contributors https://github.com/openssl/openssl/graphs/contributors EDIT: formatting