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"we" aren't lying about it to ourselves. It's enforced from the top down because VCs (such as the benefactors of this site) strongly prefer that their founders ignore culture and society to focus 100% on business. The lack of politics on HN is not some kind of community consensus.

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HN has plenty of political, cultural, and social threads. I'm surprised you haven't noticed them. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22714705 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 for more explanation.

Political topics take over everything if you let them, so we have to moderate HN to prevent it from becoming all-politics-all-flamewar-all-the-time. Do you think we should just let it burn?

Nobody's trying to "enforce" anyone to "focus 100% on business". I do worry whether users' addictions to sites like this keep them from doing better things.

Or perhaps because political arguments online are 99.9999% ineffective at changing anything, and 99.9999% effective at causing discord.

I assume someone, somewhere was once swayed by a random stranger to change their mind, but it doesn't happen often enough to outweigh the costs.

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