> Avoiding too much repetition is a core principle of this place
This principle is applied very selectively though: The homepage has been full of insignificant iterations of overly hyped tech products for years now.
It is very hard to imagine all these submissions of announcements of products with monthly release cycles gratifying anyone's intellectual curiosity. Yet it apparently does because they can stay in the homepage for 24 hours.
But for some reason, something as unprecedented as the United States government threatening Harvard with a xenophobic ban is deemed "repetitive"?
It's inconsistent but I wouldn't necessarily call that selective, because randomness plays a major role.
It's not possible for moderation to be consistent because we don't read, or even see, most of what gets posted here. There's far too much.
There are other, less obvious factors affecting this too. Here's a post where I went into this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306.
Btw, regarding this:
> insignificant iterations of overly hyped tech products for years now
HN's moderation system downweights those even more regularly than we downweight (some) political posts. Here's an explanation from a few years ago, which caused quite a stir if I remember correctly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428 (May 2020).
In both cases—incremental product releases on the one hand, and political news on the other—some posts still make it through through to the front page, and in both cases the users who want more of that category feel like it's unduly suppressed, while users who want less of that category feel like HN is overrun with it.
I believe the issue is the type of discussions that can damage the fabric of the website. Repetitive discussions on tech products are not good but can't damage the site. But discussions of politics can be inflammatory and repetitive inflammatory discussions could damage the site since it dampens intellectual curiosity of people overall. I'm not a moderator or anything so I don't know but that's just my guess based on what dang has said in previous comments.
A lot of repetitive discussions of tech things get moderated all the time as well, you can just email them in and the moderators sort them out. There's a lot of mod commentary on how things like releases, feature updates, 'launch week' etc are handled, one recent example
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43129444