You're getting downvoted because putting forward suicide as an explanation without any evidence is, well, "bad taste" doesn't really cut it. If you're going to speculate about it, at the very least give some justification.
Edit: Is it that it is not considered okay to consider suicide a plausible explanation? Is suicide a taboo, or something that would make a person seem less?
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=suicide&sort=byPopularity&pref...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=depression&sort=byPopularity&p...
There is a certain emotional dryness to scientific curiosity, at least to me, social norms do not have a say. The boundary for me are ethics. I did not see unethical behaviour, so I do not sympethize with the silent/vague outrage.
I wish we could talk about suicide more freely. Why do we talk about breast cancer but not suicide? I think because the illusion of free will is still so prevalent, and psychological problems are fallout-causingly considered connected with the concept of guilt. These archaic ideas do not stand the test of time. Science and ethics supplant them.
I once read that reports about suicide increase the likelihood of others committing suicide. Is that reason enough to censor debate about it? That is a hard ethical question. I would say it depends on the medium where the discussion is held. HN seems acceptable to me, though I see arguments against it.
This is a fundamental conflict in ethics. Where does freedom end in the face of the freedom of others?
Now, in this case, there is framing going on. One could say that group A were playing with the emotions of group B and hurt them that way. I think, on the other hand, group A wanted to have a conversation about a topic, group B did not tolerate that discussion and tried to shut it up. I think group B acted unethical. If you don't like a topic of a debate, do not take part in it. After all, that is trivially easy here on HN. To me this seems to be an example of aggressive political correctness; a topic is identified as unwanted, and attacked with the aim to shut it down.
This critique is not against you. Others that have also commented here show this behaviour blatantly. You on the other hand gave constructive critique and insight, even though I disagree with the judgement. What is a "right" way to bring up a topic? The way it was brought up was literally a single word with a question mark. I don't think this is the optimal way to constructively bring a discussion forward, but it certainly does not deserve the reaction it got.
There are valid grounds for wishing that HN was better than it is, but this case doesn't epitomise anything that is fundamentally wrong with HN; you could have done better in your initial comment, and then done better than to use it as an opportunity to take a swipe at the entire community.
For HN to be better, it relies on all of us to do our bit to make it better.
Different cultures also have different standards around speech vs. writing for such a question, as well as around public vs. private. And a small private conversation and a large public internet forum are miles apart even before bringing culture into it.
On HN we're dealing with all that and more. Our way is to try to have a local culture in which people err on the side of posting thoughtful, substantive comments. These two factors—considerateness for others and solid information—compensate for packet loss in the channels, making it easier for real communication to occur, leading to more interesting conversations. But it comes at a cost: utterances can't be quite as sharp or colorful. We give up some expressive range. Things get more bland. It took me years to reconcile myself to this—I hate blandness and am a fan of the historical art of barbed wit—but eventually I realized that if you don't make this tradeoff then the smart people eventually leave, and that would be blander to say the least.
People do sometimes mistake this approach for political correctness—and then wonder how the author of "What You Can't Say" could have created both—but that's because they don't understand what HN is going for. (I feel annoyed sometimes when people accuse us of being champions of bourgeois politesse when they haven't the least idea, but what can you do.) We're trying to optimize the site for interestingness—intellectual curiosity. The HN guidelines are an engineering tradeoff to achieve a design goal: one we have to make to protect HN from the dynamics that make internet forums less interesting and then dead. This design decision goes back to the founding of the site: see https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.