[dang]

It isn't a question of suppressing discussion, as you'll see if you look at the voluminous threads HN has had about that (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22132714). It's just a question of what's on topic in a given thread. If you allow a hotter topic with greater mass to enter into a smaller thread, the discussion will get sucked into its gravitational field. That approach leads to all threads being dominated by the same handful of hot topics over and over, so we try to avoid that here.

Re "taking one side": it always feels like mods take the other side. The people on the opposite side from you feel that we're taking your side; I guarantee it.