The Maduro one, right at the top of the list, is pretty solidly relevant to your point. If I was paying attention to politics at the time I might have asked the mods to kill it — but I can already predict what they would have said:
‘We run HN mostly hands off, and when people are insistent on flagging or discussing a topic, there’s only so much we can do while remaining largely neutral per our founding ethics.’
I continue to insist that HN will need to take more actions that are perceived as biased, over the objections of its users, if it wants to become a healthy community; but I tend to do so in the form of one or two essay-length emails a year, rather than posting to HN. Here, I think HN needs to openly be willing to kill ‘not sufficiently specialized for this site’ submissions that are still of interest to the community, which will get them labeled ‘anti-this’ and ‘pro-that’ more often than now. (It doesn’t help that most users confuse ‘user action [flagged]’ with ‘algo/mod action [dead]’, either.)
To the best of my understanding, HN’s founding ethics prioritize community votes and flags over adherence to the guidelines up until the violations become hateful, interpersonal, or form a pattern of bad outcomes sufficient to earn action. Pressuring them to take a stand for or against the community on one specific topic that isn’t covered by those points is probably less likely to pan out, but I wish you luck all the same.
As a followup, I did a live test of my interpretation today on a bank receivership post and the various outcomes from that are as described above. For the curious, the public side of that test is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50381537
‘We run HN mostly hands off, and when people are insistent on flagging or discussing a topic, there’s only so much we can do while remaining largely neutral per our founding ethics.’
I continue to insist that HN will need to take more actions that are perceived as biased, over the objections of its users, if it wants to become a healthy community; but I tend to do so in the form of one or two essay-length emails a year, rather than posting to HN. Here, I think HN needs to openly be willing to kill ‘not sufficiently specialized for this site’ submissions that are still of interest to the community, which will get them labeled ‘anti-this’ and ‘pro-that’ more often than now. (It doesn’t help that most users confuse ‘user action [flagged]’ with ‘algo/mod action [dead]’, either.)
To the best of my understanding, HN’s founding ethics prioritize community votes and flags over adherence to the guidelines up until the violations become hateful, interpersonal, or form a pattern of bad outcomes sufficient to earn action. Pressuring them to take a stand for or against the community on one specific topic that isn’t covered by those points is probably less likely to pan out, but I wish you luck all the same.