And moderators of big tech companies removing a political post from a front-page of an influential forum while it shows high interest, gratifies my intellectual curiosity even more!
It's a bit interesting to read the best steelmans, then read how even they're flawed. Apparently the US not only already has a military base on Greenland, but is allowed to build more; and Greenland's resources cost more to extract than they can be sold. It appears there really is no benefit except to anger, scare, and annoy people. What other knowledge or insight did you find?
This isn't even more outrageous than other things Trump has said. It would be if he actually invades, but he won't...
One motive might be to avoid unproductive discussions - many of the comment threads on the Greenland story (which I voted up) were angry and very polarised.
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
The link to that page plus others can be found in the 'Lists' link in the footer
There is an automated flame detection mechanism. Don't know how it works. probably some kind of count of downvoting of comments?
Users manually flag.
Most political stories are flame bait; the discussions are low quality.
Most politics is off topic, but if a story has been discussed and this one has for almost a year, posting more about the same story with little change won't add much to the conversation.
E.g. I commented about this story 10 (ten!) months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212206 and do not feel the need to share my thoughts each and every time the story comes up again, although I did 5 months ago. Maybe in 5 months time I will do so again but not every day!
Users do not want to see the same story permanently on show for discussion - they want novelty.
Users tend to not like: Emotions. Propaganda. Accusations of conspiracy. Less thoughtful and more thought terminating comments.
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You can find better and more answers by the site moderator @dang on why things slip off the front page by using the search box at the bottom of the page.
As for YCombinator - not sure about them specifically but lots of tech billionaires are for invading Greenland or at least coercing them. Joe Lonsdale (Palantir co founder) recently said in an interview that he views it as frontier land (rather than someone else’s sovereign state). Probably the rare earth minerals would help investors involved in chips or AI.