There are many genres of linkbait. You've mentioned some, but indignant denunciations are another, and so are personal appeals, especially negative ones ("no, you are not foo", "I am not your bar", and so on.) Such formulas are bait because they grab people's attention due to human hard-wiring, not anything interesting. Worse, there's a misattribution-of-arousal effect [1] where the excitement they induce is enough to guarantee upvotes—lots of upvotes. HN moderation tries to counter that effect. We don't get every call right, but I bet you'd be surprised how consistent we are.
I'm happy to have conversations about this stuff, but can imagine little more soul-destroying than having to come up with a bureaucratic taxonomy of it and a punctilious rulebook to match. That wouldn't be in HN's spirit anyhow. This place has always been about having a small number of informal principles and interpreting them as best we can. The principles are long established; there's a reason why we change the site guidelines so rarely.
I'm happy to have conversations about this stuff, but can imagine little more soul-destroying than having to come up with a bureaucratic taxonomy of it and a punctilious rulebook to match. That wouldn't be in HN's spirit anyhow. This place has always been about having a small number of informal principles and interpreting them as best we can. The principles are long established; there's a reason why we change the site guidelines so rarely.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattribution_of_arousal. I originally wrote "mere proximity" but that was the wrong effect.