‘We run HN mostly hands off, and when people are insistent on flagging or discussing a topic, there’s only so much we can do while remaining largely neutral per our founding ethics.’

I continue to insist that HN will need to take more actions that are perceived as biased, over the objections of its users, if it wants to become a healthy community; but I tend to do so in the form of one or two essay-length emails a year, rather than posting to HN. Here, I think HN needs to openly be willing to kill ‘not sufficiently specialized for this site’ submissions that are still of interest to the community, which will get them labeled ‘anti-this’ and ‘pro-that’ more often than now. (It doesn’t help that most users confuse ‘user action [flagged]’ with ‘algo/mod action [dead]’, either.)

To the best of my understanding, HN’s founding ethics prioritize community votes and flags over adherence to the guidelines up until the violations become hateful, interpersonal, or form a pattern of bad outcomes sufficient to earn action. Pressuring them to take a stand for or against the community on one specific topic that isn’t covered by those points is probably less likely to pan out, but I wish you luck all the same.

Plenty of noise still reaches the top, unfortunately. Feel free to join me in curating the off-topic articles as you see them.

> it seems to me that it's more like an empowered minority has spoken.

That is quite literally the original model of democracy, empowering a vested and vetted minority of naturally born citizens. Modern “democracy” is nothing akin to Athenian democracy, but closer to mob rule. We, the posters who have proven ourselves as high-value, have powers vested in us to curate the website. Most commenters either lack the ability or the knowledge to use it, which is for the best.