Well, it’s our fault. We had forums with categories and those had some random / chit chat category to have off topic discussions with the community while staying on topic anywhere else.
And a lot of the time, this random section was the more active of the whole forum but that was ok because it didn’t impact the other discussions.
But those were less engaging than social networks i guess (which hn is) so here we are.
...whats "on topic" for HN?
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.