Well, I know why it happened. And rightly so. I got too involved in a number of threads involving politics. I probably went counter to the ideology supported

Well, I know why it happened. And rightly so. I got too involved in a number of threads involving politics. I probably went counter to the ideology supported by those moderating HN and eventually got chopped-off at the knees. I say "rightly so" because after taking a 42 day break from HN I look back at this community with different eyes. It should be about tech and startups with as little extraneous stuff as possible. That's where HN delivers value. Taking several steps back and looking at what I've seen over the last 42 days it is obvious that most discussions that stray far away from tech are pretty much pointless whining from one side or the other of the argument. Most of these are a total waste of time. In a lot of cases they blow out of proportion because the average HN poster/reader is younger and lacking enough real-world experience. So you have worlds colliding with nothing of any measurable use being produced. Even with technical discussions there's a lot of wasted typing on HN. Everyone is responsible of this to one extent or another. I am not excluding myself from any of these characterizations. Over the last 42 days I've clicked through threads and, more often than not, I tend to dismiss them as "typical difficult programmer nit-picking" which is what I typically see when discussions between programmers turn into endlessly going back and forth on fundamentally insignificant details. Programmers are some of the most difficult people to argue with. It must be the automatic "if-then-else" and "switch" statements that you develop over the years. Anyhow, it sucks to be able to comment but not initiate threads. On the other hand, it's also a nice way to limit the time one devotes to such things. Would I like to have my thread starter privileges restored? Of course. Am I going to get into political or minutiae discussions? Nope. Waste of time, for all involved.