Those threads are obviously just pure politics of the kind that fall outside the site guidelines here, so users were right to flag them.
There's an intrinsic tension on this site: by excluding pure politics and the low level of discourse that comes with it (c.f. "butthurt Hillary supporters" elsewhere in this thread), HN becomes a place for relatively substantive discussion. Naturally, people then want to use this relatively substantive place for political discourse as well. That's understandable, because there are so few public places to have substantive discussions about politics. But if we were to let that happen, HN would soon become just like everywhere else (as I said, c.f. "butthurt Hillary supporters" elsewhere in this thread). Therefore we can't let that happen.
Unfortunately, a lot of people respond to this not with "yeah, I see the tradeoff" but with "this site is censored by butthurt Orwellians".
Comments
Sure looks like it isn't, at least not when the story at hand is...inconvenient for certain parties.
Quickly killed threads include https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12840068 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12840251
Those threads are obviously just pure politics of the kind that fall outside the site guidelines here, so users were right to flag them.
There's an intrinsic tension on this site: by excluding pure politics and the low level of discourse that comes with it (c.f. "butthurt Hillary supporters" elsewhere in this thread), HN becomes a place for relatively substantive discussion. Naturally, people then want to use this relatively substantive place for political discourse as well. That's understandable, because there are so few public places to have substantive discussions about politics. But if we were to let that happen, HN would soon become just like everywhere else (as I said, c.f. "butthurt Hillary supporters" elsewhere in this thread). Therefore we can't let that happen.
Unfortunately, a lot of people respond to this not with "yeah, I see the tradeoff" but with "this site is censored by butthurt Orwellians".