I'm sorry—and yes, it may have been the wrong call. I don't know how to make all right calls. If a good HN user is still upset about something years later, that probably means we messed up somehow.
People often propose mechanistic rules like "allow all such posts" or "allow no such posts". The simplicity of that has an obvious appeal in the abstract, but I don't think it's viable on HN. This place doesn't function mechanistically. Human interpretation is constantly required: messy, unsatisfying, flawed human interpretation.
apology accepted! and sorry if it came off a bit harsh.
to be fair, the all-or-nothing suggestion isn't practicable on the face of it (otherwise you'd get more troll postings, or more unhappy users), so it was more an opening gambit than a fleshed out suggestion.
however, it's pretty clear that implicit biases strongly and unflatteringly drive[0] what gets flagged and what gets popularized (largely by hn users of course). is it hn's job to address implicit bias? that's certainly debatable, but i'd think you'd want the widest reach possible and potentially turning away upwards of 80-90% of the world's population isn't a long-term winning strategy for yc.
most entertainers (singers, actors, celebrities, etc.) are stale topics of conversation (mostly rehashes of what they did/said), but way too many make the front page anyway (or conversely, far too few of the more interesting ones make it).
[0]: it'd probably be an interesting exercise to analyze what obit posts gets flagged, uncommented/unpromoted, and popularized. i've casually observed (and even tested a bit) that nearly all the black/brown people and most women don't make the front page, many of whom are fascinating historically, otherwise they wouldn't have cleared the higher bar for getting noticed in the face of bias in the first place.
People often propose mechanistic rules like "allow all such posts" or "allow no such posts". The simplicity of that has an obvious appeal in the abstract, but I don't think it's viable on HN. This place doesn't function mechanistically. Human interpretation is constantly required: messy, unsatisfying, flawed human interpretation.