But is this story stimulating our intellectual curiosity, or our morbid curiosity? I'd say it's the later. Any news coming out now will be shallow and repetitive. If, after more research and reflection a long-form story is written exploring the event's social, political, and statistical relevance then perhaps it will be suitable for HN.

But right now, context-free sound bites, unconfirmed rumors, and banal opinions are just noise that you can read everywhere else on the internet.

HN facilitates rational and typically civil discourse. As such it seems like an appropriate place to discuss non-tech issues which are of interest to a large portion of the user-base.

True, but:

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

1905 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9784470

David Bowie Has Died

1484 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879262

Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

1459 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233646

Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

1373 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416928

How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

1249 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233730

and more...

The Panama Papers story is arguably tech related.

The guidelines also say:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

Mass shootings in the US are not a new phenomenon. This is a mainstream news story, it doesn't belong here.

This isn't a story about a mass shooting. It's a story about how a very large internet site is responding to the story.

I would agree with you about this particular thread, and I don't think it should be flagged, even though there's no new or interesting phenomenon to stories about Reddit "censorship" either.

But the stories about the shooting itself do deserve to be flagged. A line has to be drawn somewhere, otherwise Hacker News becomes Reddit without subreddits.

But Reddit already exists and is better at being Reddit than HN will ever be.

Meta is death, and this type of speculative meta about some other website is particularly dull.

EDIT: And it's not even about the website, it's about a handful of mods in a handful of subreddits.

Really the answer to this is set up your own subreddit, or use Voat.

Relevant example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563540