zlacker

Precisely. HN's posters aren't any more sophisticated than other forums. It's simply that polarizing topics like current affairs and politics are essentially banned here. Because other forums do not ban them, they have to have rules about not abusing other members, doxxing etc.

The commentariat's genteel reputation also evaporates once you step into the "political" threads HN does allow, namely immigration, outsourcing and of course, crime in San Francisco.

A former head of state in Ycombinator's home country is headed to trial, and a coup plotter in the world's current largest military conflict is apparently dead. Both of these are historic events, but you'd never know that on HN.

>>rchaud+(OP)
Stories dominating coverage elsewhere mostly shouldn't dominate HN. That's not a particular political position—it just follows from the type of site we're trying to have here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Plenty of stories with political overlap [1] still get discussed on HN. Your list seems cherry-picked to me - presumably because those are the topics you dislike, and mostly people overemphasize, and are more likely to notice, the data points they dislike [2].

I'm not sure where you got the idea that HN doesn't have rules, but it does, and they certainly exclude abusing other members [3], doxxing [4], etc.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...