Comment by dang

By that logic, HN should be a current affairs site, dedicated to talking about the most important things in the world—of which this war certainly is one.

But that's not the kind of site HN is or ever has been, so the question becomes: does a site like HN, with its particular mandate, have a right to exist? or should it be replaced by something more important? This question has been around for a good 15 years. Our answer is: we're trying to have a specific kind of website, and it's ok for it to exist, even though it's not the most important.

People with strong views (perhaps entirely justified) on a topic don't like it when that topic doesn't get as much coverage as they think it should. Often they think it should dominate HN's front page completely and anything less than that is a deplorable failure on the part of the admins, who obviously lack any morals or humanity. If I answer that yes, this topic is important, deserves discussion, and has indeed been receiving it—more than any other topic of its kind—well, one quickly learns that such demands can never be satisfied, short of replacing the site with an entirely different one, and even then probably not. Moreover such demands come in from multiple angles about multiple topics and the people making the demands not only disagree amongst themselves but are even at war with each other.

This dynamic has been playing out for many years, and if we had done as you say, HN would have ceased to exist a long time ago. I think it's a good thing that HN still exists, even though many of the things on its front page are trivial and of so much less importance than the suffering, violence, and cruelty going on in the world that it's grotesque to even compare them.