I agree that it doesn't add much to HN when stories like this are voted up on to the front page, but the implied alternative where stories like this are purposefully blocked from being on the front page by some mechanism is so much worse. It's far better to accept a little irrelevant gossip at the cost of the community than to start censoring what we can vote on and destroy the integrity on HN altogether.

Right, I agree with that completely - I'm more suggesting we should be a bit ashamed of ourselves as a community for pushing the equivalent of tech tabloid news to the front page.

There are more appropriate mediums to argue in if we feel Paul Allen isn't responding well enough to "the incident".

It is interesting to follow this to see how he responds. It is a glimpse into his true character.

Our interpretation of the events is very possibly limited - we as a community are hardly informed enough to be judges of Paul Allen's character. It's just poor content, that leads to a lot of silly trolling and adds very little to Hacker News.