HN and all other web sites are there for whatever purposes their users wish to use it for, within the constraints of whatever actions are implemented on a site.

This is one of the things that infuriates me about StackOverflow and its army of article closing moderators. A real community will change its practices and perceptions over time according to the needs of the community. If you have a subset of people who decide what a site is for, forever and ever without change, then it's not a community, it's a cast. Or it's a system of castes.