Comment by joreilly

I'm a relatively new user to HN. I've greatly appreciated how much more civil the conversations tend to be when compared to reddit. I have noticed, however, that news submissions, especially those which do not inherently have a technological aspect to them, tend to digress into what I can only assume are strongly held, but not adequately supported, opinions on the topic. These are then met by a flurry of flags. Further, submissions such as this one seem to directly contradict the HN guidelines, as it is arguably [1]:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

On one hand, this type of submission is not a new phenomenon and has been submitted to HN multiple times. If you search for Hong Kong arrests on HN, you get dozens of results; for example, [2][3][4][5], etc. On the other hand, I understand why people who feel strongly about this topic want to submit content pertaining to it past an initial submission some months ago.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654143

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846681

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23698247

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654803