Comment by throwworhtthrow

> There is clearly something unusual happening with flags

I'd say what's unusual is the macro environment. This is the most politically intense moment in years. HN can't be immune from macro trends (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572 for recent posts on that). The current thread has been on the front page for 9 hours and counting, and has over 1000 comments and counting.

I know some people would prefer more, but that is always the case about any topic. Moreover, everyone has at least one topic they feel that way about. These are perennial conditions that come from the fundamentals of the site, not recent trends.

> it's healthier in the long term for Hacker News to allow perhaps excessive discussions on these currently popular topics

I have to disagree—I think the health of Hacker News depends on not doing this. Times like this are moments to reinforce HN's differentiation from other forums by insisting on its particular focus (i.e. that it's a forum for intellectual curiosity, not a current affairs site).If we lose users who get frustrated because they can't use HN primarily for political battle, that makes me sad, but the solution is not to use HN primarily for political battle.

> Otherwise HN risks developing a reputation that it systematically suppresses discussions critical of the current administration.

It's not true that HN does this, so anyone who believes it is jumping to a false conclusion. It bothers me a lot when people do that, but you wouldn't believe how often it happens, and how many kinds of false generalization people come up with—I could give you hundreds of examples. I've learned that it's a bad idea to worry too much about the false conclusions about HN that people jump to for reasons of their own. Not that I've stopped worrying too much about it—I still do, I've just learned that it's a bad idea.