I would be happy if the New York Times was banned from this site. An awful lot of low quality and off topic content from there seems to constantly make it to the front page here.
It makes it to the front page because people vote it up. This makes it de facto on-topic.
I think this is good, FWIW. I just don't think it's useful to argue that it shouldn't be removed just because it's upvoted because that's clearly not how HN is run.
afaict, HN mods generally remove submissions because their comments are a dumpster fire. Though I haven't witnessed it in a while. The last dumpster fire comment section I saw, dang just stickied his comment to try to encourage people to get back on the topic of the article and avoid the obvious knee-jerk response to it.
Such high quality discourse