> But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem>
We can't use such a metric. The magnitude of those problems is so large that there would be nothing else on the front page if we did.
HN is trying to be a specific kind of site—one that gratifies intellectual curiosity:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I think it's ok for such a place to exist on the web, don't you? If so, many things follow. The site can't primarily be about litigating disputes or fighting for causes, even (especially) good causes. In fact it can't 'primarily' be about anything, because curiosity shrivels under repetition. Therefore HN's system (community + mods + software) is organized not to have too much, i.e. very much, of anything on the front page.
The issue isn't that HN suppresses discussion of e.g. sexism/gender in tech; it doesn't—there have been tons of threads, often large, often on the front page. The issue is that <front page time>/<how much I care about X> is always, for any X, less than you would like. For most casual observers, "less than I would like" feels like "censored completely". Meanwhile the readers who don't like X have the mirror-image view and say "HN is overrun with X". It's all an undergraduate psych experiment basically.
Pretty sure that's not true. IMO you're falling into the cognitive bias we all seem to have, of seeing the community as dominated by your ideological opposite. The other side sees it just the other way. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15388778, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915, and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....
> But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem>
We can't use such a metric. The magnitude of those problems is so large that there would be nothing else on the front page if we did.
HN is trying to be a specific kind of site—one that gratifies intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I think it's ok for such a place to exist on the web, don't you? If so, many things follow. The site can't primarily be about litigating disputes or fighting for causes, even (especially) good causes. In fact it can't 'primarily' be about anything, because curiosity shrivels under repetition. Therefore HN's system (community + mods + software) is organized not to have too much, i.e. very much, of anything on the front page.
The issue isn't that HN suppresses discussion of e.g. sexism/gender in tech; it doesn't—there have been tons of threads, often large, often on the front page. The issue is that <front page time>/<how much I care about X> is always, for any X, less than you would like. For most casual observers, "less than I would like" feels like "censored completely". Meanwhile the readers who don't like X have the mirror-image view and say "HN is overrun with X". It's all an undergraduate psych experiment basically.