You may be under a misimpression of what's on topic here. Nothing has changed. HN has always been for posts that gratify intellectual curiosity, on literally any topic. Betty Davis is interesting because of her music, her story, and her historical significance.

Of course, no post gratifies everyone's curiosity—the front page is an amalgam of a lot of people's different tastes. If this topic isn't to yours, there are plenty of others to look at. If you'd please do that instead and refrain from posting unsubstantive comments, we'd appreciate it.

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

Note that word probably (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426). Betty Davis is hardly the epitome of a TV news story.

Perhaps not. But my quote illustrates an exception to your statement that “HN has always been for posts that gratify intellectual curiosity, on literally any topic.”. There has to be some limitation on what is considered interesting, or else HN will simply always contain the top news headlines. I think that HN too often does not follow the quoted guideline, and instead appears to simply follow the rule that “people on HN are interested in this, therefore it belongs here”, and I think that this reasoning, unchecked, will lead HN to be a simple general news commentary site, and not a site limited to specific topics. If this happens, I fear that HN will attract people who will want to comment on those general news issues, and then it’ll be all over.

That guideline about TV news is there precisely because most such stories are not intellectually interesting. If HN were going to become a general news site, this would have happened already 10+ years ago. Things have been stable in this respect, at least, for a long long time, and a thread about Betty Davis represents zero threat to the quality of HN. On the contrary, it enhances it.

I realize different people would make borderline calls differently. I'm making that call on this one; if you disagree, fair enough. But on a level of the principle involved, there's no change here.

Yeah, OK. As long as you’re aware of the issue, then I have no problem with you drawing the line slightly differently. I was just worried that you weren’t aware of it, since in my opinion, HN has seemed to contain too much mainstream news, with every questioning immediately shot down with “it’s interesting!”, and then your comment seemed to imply that no restrictions whatsoever were to be applied. But if you’re aware that one actually has to make a judgement on it, then I have no real problem with it; good work overall.

while i do appreciate the stand made here for a black woman, note that a different call was made for kobe bryant's death for unexplained reasons. not meant as a personal attack, but there does seem to be some capriciousness in these decisions. perhaps all death notices should be unflaggable (and let them rise or fall on their merits), or they should all be out of scope for hn.

i personally find death notices (and especially the in-/out-moderation of them) to carry more cultural propaganda than genuine curiosity, so i'd be totally fine with the latter approach.

Kobe Bryant, whose death made news for weeks, is your comparison point?

teddyh, do realize the person you are responding to is the moderator of HN?

As it happens, no. I almost never look at usernames, as the design of HN discourages from doing so, by making user names hard to read. And even if I had, is moderatorial infallibility a dogma? Put another way, does any conversation improve by “do you know who I am?”? What is the purpose of your comment? To make me retract my comment because I didn’t know who I was disagreeing with?

The OP may have not necessarily been doing something along the lines of appeal to authority.

They could have just been informing you.

We are supposed to take good faith assumptions, right?

OTOH, I feel you with what you wrote. In general the things you wrote are unfortunately common.

Your second sentence about never looking at usernames and so on.

People have befriended either for networking purposes or otherwise, others on HN. It doesn’t have to be a cold straight forward only place

> They could have just been informing you.

Possibly, and they are free to tell me that; I did ask them what they meant, after all.

That guideline probably should be revised, all manner of tech news is covered on television these days.