There will be other articles that provide a better foundation to discuss that (i.e. "what comes next").
On HN the idea is we want some, but not too much, discussion of such issues, and for the discussion to be intellectually curious rather than flamingly indignant. For the first point to work, we can't have too many threads; and for the second to work, the threads we do have need to be based on more substantive articles (and events).
The problem is that there's a finite number of writers of substantive articles; the strategy used by these trolls-in-chief is to overload these writers by conducting a blitzkrieg of events. By preventing substantive articles from being created for each event, they benefit the lack of public discourse that occurs for each singular event.
Thus I feel like youre right in everything youve said, but your decision is exactly what the trolls were hoping for. I think part of it is the design of hackernews threads; I think the old internet 1.0 forum style would be better suited for today's discourse. Having a dozen stickied threads for each of the executive orders inside of a sub forum for "news and events", for example.
The old 1.0 forums went by the wayside for good reasons, but the current upvote style has been in place for a long enough time now for bad actors to learn the strategies that manipulate the upvote system. IMO there's a need for a new forum style to replace the upvote/article based system.
Is that really want the trolls were hoping for? A political researcher interpretation (published on Swedish national news) was that this kind of behavior is historically common, where a group or person want to generate news by first initiating a provocation and then directly denying and distance themselves from it. The goal is to both cause provocation in order to generate media coverage, and also to distance themselves from the interpretation in order to paint themselves (for the in-group) in a good light while at the same time framing the opposition. In extension this helps them to distance the in-group from the out-group. The analyze also mention a possible in-group that include pro-Israel, which makes the distancing of the interpreted provocation critical.
That may or may not be a correct analyze of the situation, and other political researchers might make a different interpretation, but in that scenario the goal is to get people to talk about it. The opposite would be for the story to be buried and ignored.
Do you consider this interpretation of the topic interesting and 'curious' enough for hackernews?
One of the main reasons that I come here is to interact with people in the tech industry and I think that the opinions of the people who work for the man or who have worked for the man about this event are important to hear.
Probably not, because most of the responses aren't coming from employees, the ones that say they are may not be, and even the real ones may not feel free to say much.
If it were verified employees saying what they really think, would that be interesting? Sure. Even then though, keep in mind that HN's standard isn't "interesting", it's intellectually interesting. Similarly, it isn't "gratify curiosity", it's "gratify intellectual curiosity" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
There are other kinds of curiosity (e.g. social curiosity) and they're interesting too (to me also!) but they're not the same as intellectual curiosity and thus not what this site is primarily for.
It's not surprising that most of the responses aren't coming from employees in an /r/askreddit post. I would imagine that the signal to noise ratio in a similar HN post would be better because there are more people who have worked for Musk or know someone who have worked for Musk here.
As I said above, part of the draw of this website is having a chance to see the comments from people who may or may not have the experience that they claim to have and to decide yourself if what they're saying has merit. A big difference between this site and Reddit is that people often use their real names and they'll even sometimes link to their github pages or resumes. Even if they're using pseudonyms they'll have extensive comment histories that span years of thoroughly written comments. All of this is stuff that can allow the reader to better judge the veracity of claims made. Regardless of the difficulty in verifying people's claims it's really hard to find another website that such a great concentration of people in these kinds of fields.
And there is an intellectual curiosity to this subject, but it isn't the kind that can be encapsulated in a single discussion. The value in something like this comes over time as a chain of discussions are posted on a site like HN. This allows us to observe and understand how people's opinions on this controversial figure evolve over time.
Imagine if HN existed during the time when Von Braun became instrumental in the American space program. Being able to go back and read comments on that critical and fascinating slice of American history and geopolitics would be fascinating even if it's the mundane knee-jerk crap that people post on forums immediately after events like these. Historians would certainly find it absolutely intellectually interesting. It's the kind of content that would even shape contemporary conversations about this current event.
I understand that there are extreme difficulties in moderating these kinds of discussions but there is absolutely merit in these kinds of discussions happening on a site like HN.
On HN the idea is we want some, but not too much, discussion of such issues, and for the discussion to be intellectually curious rather than flamingly indignant. For the first point to work, we can't have too many threads; and for the second to work, the threads we do have need to be based on more substantive articles (and events).