[dang]

Moderation is soft power. People think we have the power to be heavy handed, and a lot of users think that's what we do (just look at threads like this one), but we don't and we aren't. Mostly we just try to please the community, while doing our best to foster the mandate of the site. Of course this is impossible; the community can't be pleased, because different people want different things and many are incompatible. But if there's a way to keep it least-unpleased, that's what we're going for.

The posts you're asking about are in the vexed category where parts of the community feel they absolutely belong on HN while other parts believe they don't. Not only that, but the topics themselves have contradictory qualities: they're partly intellectually interesting, partly sensational gossip, partly a political slugfest. Unfortunately the slugfest is dominating everything else right now. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824. That's also why I pinned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010948 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010908 to the top of the two threads last night.

I don't know if that answers your question. It's hard to talk about this briefly. I've written a lot about how we moderate politics on HN, and some of it may make sense in this context. Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29219906

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

Lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

If you take a look at those explanations and still have a question I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to hear what it is.