> The one thing wrong with it is that they are not flattering for the tech oligarchs

HN hosts plenty of threads that are "not flattering for the tech oligarchs", so I don't think we're considering the same things.

The issue here is repetition. Avoiding too much repetition on HN's front page is a core principle [1] (or rather, an important consequence of the core principle [2]). There have been quite a few frontpage threads about goings-on in the U.S. government right now (I can think of 4 from yesterday, and there were no doubt more that I've forgotten).

It's not all off topic, but at the same time we can't have every one of these threads on the front page—it wouldn't leave any room for anything else, and HN is not primarily a political or current affairs site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Also, it would provoke an even larger backlash from the community (who don't come here primarily for those things) than the one currently complaining about flags.

So what do we do? Here is the basic approach:

When there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) [3], we tend to downweight follow-ups and less-substantial articles and try to reserve frontpage slots for stories that haven't been discussed yet, have articles that can serve as a foundation for substantive discussion, and contain significant new information [4]. In this way, HN can host a certain amount of frontpage discussion about the latest MOT without being overrun by it.

People inevitably disagree about which specific articles are substantive, contain SNI, and so on, but from a moderation point of view the specific composition of articles matters less than the underlying principles [6]. The latter have held up well over the years and haven't changed.

Whenever a divisive MOT comes along, the users who feel most passionately always complain that not enough articles are getting through. This time is different, they say, and therefore we should change the rules [5]. The trouble is that "this time" always feels different. HN has been around long enough to undergo (and survive) many of these waves. The main thing we learned from these experiences is no, the rules didn't need to change, and we were right to stick to them. MOTs come and go, no tsunami lasts forever, and preserving HN for its intended purpose is the right strategy.

If people want to make a case for a particular article meeting the criteria I mentioned, and deserving to be unflagged and maybe be on the front page, that's great. But please familiarize yourselves with the principles first, so we can be having the same conversation. A common case is when people's strong passions about a MOT make them feel like every related article is critical and needs emergency frontpage accommodation. Then when that doesn't happen, they feel like the system is rigged, oligarchy overlords are suppressing truth, the mods are secretly on the other side, and other intense imaginings.

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

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

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

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

[5] Actually, this being the internet, they're more likely to say things like "the mods are suppressing discussion to serve their masters" and so on.

[6] I wrote a different long thing about this a couple weeks ago, should anyone strangely want more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306.