HN is about more than just tech and startups. That's why https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html has a

HN is about more than just tech and startups. That's why https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html has always said "more than hacking and startups" right in the opening paragraph. In fact, that's the genesis of HN: pg got bored of reading only about tech and startups and renamed Startup News to Hacker News back in 2007 (https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html). There's room for stories with political overlap. At the same time, we can't have too many, or HN would turn into a current affairs site and cease to be HN. That's a tough set of constraints. We've found an approach over the years which balances the tradeoffs well enough (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), but it has the disadvantage of not satisfying everybody. Actually, it has the disadvantage of not satisfying anybody who feels passionately about a given topic. That's especially true of the Israel/Gaza topic. There are many readers who feel like HN is unfairly suppressing it, and there are also many readers who feel like HN is unfairly featuring it. The other disadvantage is that there's no effective way to communicate about this to the community. No matter how many explanations we post, the set of users who actually get the message always seems to have measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20measure%20zero&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).