You're right. But this is the perennial question of what sort of site HN is supposed to be. If the criterion for frontpage threads were importance, then HN would be a current affairs site—a completely different place. That's not the mandate we have (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Optimizing for curiosity [1] means including whimsical things like "Doom on a dongle", "how much do all of the ants in the world weigh", and so on, and less space for a lot of more important things. This follows from the mandate of the site.
Sometimes people feel like we should exclude political stories altogether, but that's not right—what we've learned about optimizing-for-curiosity is that some political discussion needs to be included—just not too much [2].
How much is too much? Well, that's the thing that nobody agrees on. For the people who feel most strongly about a story, it's never too much. That's how "literally the most-discussed topic on the site" turns into the perception "all discussion on this topic is being suppressed" [3].
Comments
You're right. But this is the perennial question of what sort of site HN is supposed to be. If the criterion for frontpage threads were importance, then HN would be a current affairs site—a completely different place. That's not the mandate we have (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Optimizing for curiosity [1] means including whimsical things like "Doom on a dongle", "how much do all of the ants in the world weigh", and so on, and less space for a lot of more important things. This follows from the mandate of the site.
Sometimes people feel like we should exclude political stories altogether, but that's not right—what we've learned about optimizing-for-curiosity is that some political discussion needs to be included—just not too much [2].
How much is too much? Well, that's the thing that nobody agrees on. For the people who feel most strongly about a story, it's never too much. That's how "literally the most-discussed topic on the site" turns into the perception "all discussion on this topic is being suppressed" [3].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572