zlacker

A lot of articles do match the very first thing in the guideline's list of what's off topic:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Specifically, there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation.

>>nitwit+(OP)
Just cause they are related to humanities or discuss masculinity, minorities or race in tech doesn't make them political by default.

A topic being discussed a lot in politics doesn't necessarily mean that that topic is political imo

>>leonon+L
You don't appear to have read what I wrote very carefully. The problem is that they fill most of the article with a general discussion of politics, making the article mostly about general politics.

People are naturally going to flag such an article.

>>nitwit+82
Right, I'm sorry. I misread that

>>leonon+L
Sturgeon's Law, though. The average article on all of those topics is a pile of political flamebait.

>>nitwit+82
That's true. And there's the additional factor that the more familiar a topic is, the more likely the thread is to fill up with generic comments about it. That's what the HN guidelines call generic tangents: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Those are probably the most repetitive kinds of thread, and therefore the least valuable.

This phenomenon shows up in most political threads but also in threads that aren't particularly political. The more generic topics have so much mass that they act like black holes that suck in all the interesting discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

>>nitwit+(OP)
The devil is in the details, though:

>unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

And that's where we will never truly agree until the topic runs super sour. Which can take months.

> there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation.

it makes sense for multiple reasons, no? You never want to assume the general audience is caught up on every little piece of an evolving story, be it a simple celebrity drama or some complex political issue. It's news, not a research paper.