For the obvious reason: the community is divided on whether it's on topic, so some users keep submitting the stories and other users keep flagging them.
I don't know that there's much here that's intellectually interesting. This is probably one of those moments where HN can distinguish itself by not paying attention to a story.
Regarding priors, the argument "$X1 got attention so why shouldn't $X2" doesn't work on HN, because there's a power-law dropoff in interestingness along any predictable sequence. So if Jeff and MacKenzie got a lot of attention, that's actually a reason why Bill and Melinda wouldn't.
I don't know that there's much here that's intellectually interesting. This is probably one of those moments where HN can distinguish itself by not paying attention to a story.
Regarding priors, the argument "$X1 got attention so why shouldn't $X2" doesn't work on HN, because there's a power-law dropoff in interestingness along any predictable sequence. So if Jeff and MacKenzie got a lot of attention, that's actually a reason why Bill and Melinda wouldn't.
I'm not really sure that was the case to begin with though—these threads look pretty uninteresting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18868713, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18865291