[Gnolfo]

It's not the single odd submission that comes up that is really what offends, it's more of the slippery slope it invites that historically can overwhelm the quality of popular websites. Take the frequency of outlier commentary and multiply it by the internet and you get trouble.

It can be curbed with a culture of self moderation, it can be curbed with enforced rules and other barriers, a good early example of this is Something Awful's combination of introducing a registration fee along with a reputation for banning users who posted crap. It's survived through the years and I'd venture this was a factor.

But the point is if your site becomes highly popular there will always be the risk of drowning under a low signal:noise ratio. Hence the sensitivity to posts like this here because <asskissing>the HN crowd as a whole has a lot of experience with this phenomenom</asskissing>.