zlacker

i see, so this topic is considered 'intellectually curious' while anti-ccp is 'loyalty to a cause'

i am not really sure how you make that determination, i personally find accounts of what the ccp does to exploit its citizens intellectually interesting when it is not widely reported

so, given you exponential drop off comment, i assume that means a small number of highly voted protest posts are allowed, and then past that point they will get modded. is that correct?

and yes, we had this discussion before, and i became confused in this context since protest topics also seem prone to intellectually uninteresting flamewars hn wishes to avoid

it seems there is an exception in this kind of case where a controversial topic is allowed if it is new

technically, police brutality and protesta are not new topics, but i suppose this exception is the current national impact?

>>yters+(OP)
The issue isn't the topic itself but the amount of repetition around it. Curiosity withers under repetition. You would see exactly the same pattern if the current topic ended up getting repeated a lot: the users who felt most strongly about it ('loyalty to a cause') would want every single article to be on the front page, and would feel like the mods and/or community must be pro-police-brutality if that didn't happen, just as some people feel like we must be pro-communist or pro-China or whatever.

I tried to explain that above, and linked to past explanations of the same points. If you want to take a look at those past explanations, and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be curious to know what it is. Perhaps it would be helpful to describe what these links contain more explicitly:

(1) We try to optimize HN for intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(2) Curiosity and repetition don't go well together: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(3) With submissions on a MOT (major ongoing topic), the main thing we look for is SNI (significant new information): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

As far as I can tell, the complete answer to your question follows from those three points.

>>dang+X
Yes, #3 is the key point, that there are exceptions to the flamewar constraint if there is some new, interesting information for a current major topic..