> So, porn, then? Surely there must be limits.

Believe it or not, this mod comment from 5 years ago addresses just that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23087737 (May 2020)

The, er, money quote would be this:

When we say "interesting" we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest or curiosity. For example, there is social curiosity (the sort that powers celebrity gossip). There is political curiosity (wanting to know how one's side is doing against the other side). There is sexual curiosity (no comment needed). These things all have their place, but not here. On the other hand, there can also be overlap with intellectual curiosity, in which case it's fine, though the bar is higher in some cases than others.

There's a lot from @dang about how the site goal is optimizing for curiosity and what that means in practice.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

The qualifier "most" is very important there. Certainly opinions can differ as to what should fall under "most" and what shouldn't. But citing that line to justify flagging a politics-related story isn't a good argument.

>So, porn, then? Surely there must be limits.

Pretty sure HN has discussed porn, the porn industry, sex work, sex workers, etc tons.

For example you can find in my history on posts about how porn access is being restricted that the "They have more fraud" claim is likely false and claimed in bad faith, and in fact Pornhub has been so removed from the payments industry that they now seem to have grafted themselves onto the internet gambling industry to make money, which is just awful. They have not turned to crypto payments because they just don't work, which is interesting to discuss.

But you would never see any of those discussions if you banned from the front page anything that mentioned porn.

Do you see how that works? Interesting discussion is about who is discussing, not about what is being discussed.

IMO the topic guidelines are entirely the wrong way to ensure meaningful discussion. All they have done, as clearly evidenced by the time HN tried to outright ban politics, is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to participate in and contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here", despite the guidelines themselves saying "If it's here, it belongs here"

HN also bans a lot of meta discussion which is crap, as talking about the sneaky and intransparent parts of HN, like the Orange Nametag cohort, would be interesting to the constant influx of new accounts.

I for one would also find deep dives into moderation or site meta information to be very interesting. I deal with abuse prevention in my day job, so seeing how others experience that abuse and deal with it would be not just interesting to me, but downright educational.

Meanwhile, HN is full of "I slapped an LLM into someone else's open source code" as if that is interesting at all. The entire point of vibe coding and agents etc is that anyone else could do that just as easily. So it seems "being interesting to hackers" just isn't the actual desired content.