> So, sending it to page 4 quick-like has too many downsides? I am not an expert in community management, I'm interested to understand why.

We're not experts either. It's not as if there's any foundation for this job other than just doing it, badly.

I'll try to explain how I personally think about this. One thing is clear: the core value of HN is intellectual curiosity and that's what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). I'd refine that one bit further by saying it's broad intellectual curiosity. There's also narrow intellectual curiosity, which has its place too, but is a different thing. (And there are other forms of curiosity, e.g. social curiosity, which motivates things like celebrity news and gossip. Those also have their place. But they're less relevant here.)

What's the difference between broad and narrow intellectual curiosity? If you think of curiosity as a desire and willingness to take in new information, then I'd say "broad" means wanting to take in new information about almost anything—whatever's going on in reality, the world, etc., just because it's there; and "narrow" means wanting new information, but only about a restricted subset of things. That means there's an excluded set of topics—things about which one could take in new information, but for whatever reason, doesn't want to. Maybe it's too painful, for example.

What I'm saying is that the current topic is one of a small set of topics which are admittedly painful (and I'd say that pain shows up as anger in a lot of the comments here—on all sides of the topic) but which broad intellectual curiosity simply cannot exclude. If we exclude it, then we're failing to optimize for what we're optimizing for. In that sense, not discussing it at all would be a failure.

[editing - bear with me...]