You guys should really expand on what 'gratifies intellectual curiosity' means, in the guidelines. Stuff like this article is interesting, but all too often people claim how they are really intellectually gratified by an article calling Trump a doody-head troglodyte or some such thing.
I would suggest that one such metric is if you learned something interesting from an article, rather than having the article simply confirm your own beliefs.
> all too often people claim how they are really intellectually gratified by an article calling Trump a doody-head troglodyte
I almost never see that. There's isn't much controversy around what counts as "intellectually interesting" here. People spend more effort trying wrongly to narrow the scope of HN, e.g. claiming that it's only about startups and tech, flagging all non-technical posts, etc., all of which is against the spirit of the site (and bad, in my opinion, for technical creativity too).
The standards are better established de facto than de jure—the last thing we want is legalistic arguing about rules. So I think the traditional description suffices:
A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting. What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, perhaps it could be.
Edit: but if there's something we could do to get more high-quality links posted about historical topics, arts and letters, geography, anthropology, etc.—the myriads of interesting stories outside HN's couple of core grooves—I would love to hear about it. They are particularly welcome and we rarely have enough of them.
You take such a mature and balanced approach toward content on the site. The content is interesting and thought provoking. It's why HN is my primary source of daily news. Please keep it up!
A metaphor just occurred to me: Hacker News is like a better Internet version of what the Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel used to be in their golden days (back when MTV played music videos, before reality TV). HN is much better than that, since those were still TV, and did not cover business and leadership, but that's the best analogy I can come up with at the moment. I get far more out of reading HN-provided links and comments for hours than I ever did TV.
I do miss the content of old, which was 1/3 general interest, 1/3 hacker interest, and 1/3 business development. I'm not really a business guy, but it was interesting reading about how to do things like measure retention, or A/B test things with customers, or how to read your market. These days it seems that the only business-related things are either puff pieces or people talking about salary and job interviews.