Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny how allowing voting on submissions makes some people judge the value of submissions by the number of votes they may have gotten, while at the same time completely forgetting that each of those votes shows that some person found the submission valuable. Look, if submitting C2 articles had no value for anyone on HN, they simply would not get any votes. The fact that they get votes means that the people who voted…
Point taken. But reading HN, I feel a bit the way I did about a year ago as one of Philadelphia's city councilmen was goading the police into cracking down on miscreant cyclists: There are profound asymmetries in the way these guidelines (which people quote like the were whispered in PG's ear by God Himself) are applied. In the case of Philly last year, you had cops obliviously riding their cop bicycles on sidewalks…
It sounds like you're saying that people shouldn't be forced to look at something that they don't want to see. And I fully agree with that.
That's why I've long advocated allowing HN articles to be tagged. That way, if you (for example) don't want to see any articles from c2, you can filter out articles with the "c2" tag.
Unfortunately, the powers that be (and the majority of HN users themselves) don't want to allow tags on HN. So we're stuck with the situation we have now, where people will submit whatever they think is appropriate, and HN readers are deluged with everything that manages to get enough votes.
If you have a better solution for this problem, I'm all ears.
"This isn't anarchy: there are rules"
There are guidelines, and the guidelines say that what's appropriate to HN is:
Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than
hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer
might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.