This story is on topic because it's a major historical event and history has always been on topic here. If it doesn't produce an intellectually curious response in you, you're welcome to find something else that does—there are plenty of other things to read—but in that case please refrain from posting.
Positive-empty comments aren't substantive either, but as pg pointed out way back when HN was getting started (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html), those are benign. The comments we need to avoid are the malignant ones.
Edit: by positive-empty I just meant comments like these:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32770030
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769786
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769037
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769019
I'm not telling you guys to be royalists! I'm just asking you not to post crap comments, which this thread was filled with when I first saw it. We don't care what you're for or against, we just care about people using HN as intended.
Edit 2: I think the problem is that this comment has outlived its usefulness at the top of the thread because the bottom of the barrel comments have mostly been moderated away, whether by user flags or by us. I'm going to unpin this and mark it offtopic now. Please don't post any more bottom-of-barrel comments!—and if you see some, please flag them.
I am kind of curious about what this means exactly. Is any criticism of the monarchy off limits? Is the purpose of this thread for people to air their positive thoughts about this lady?
For example, I find non-British people that are genuinely sad about her passing to be pretty bizarre. It’s a fascinating event to look at how we tend to form parasocial relationships with carefully curated depictions of people.
It’s even more bizarre when we make actual rules to enforce orthodoxy and stifle criticism of parasocial relationships with carefully curated depictions of people.
This insistence on an arbitrary standard of decorum and the compulsion to play out a socially-prescribed bit of theater is pretty odd. Queen Elizabeth was paradoxically both not powerful enough to warrant lumping her in with British failings and at the same time so powerful that we are compelled to speak highly of her.
(Edit: that first sentence is really a template instantiation. When I post like this, it's never for or against <T>. It's always just about internet comments. People who are against <T> (or for it) often react like we're for <T> (or against it), but this is an illusion. It could quickly be cured by grokking the template, since at that level all these posts are entirely the same.)
It may not make so much sense now, but this thread was filling with the worst sort of dumb flamebait when it got started. That it isn't so now is because I've spent the last 3 hours refreshing the page and meticulously moderating it. If some of my comments are a little dyspeptic, that's because dealing with tedious comments is tedious, and I sort of pep myself up by letting loose a bit. Not the finest of practices but esprit de corps is also a need.