I think that's about right. I don't want to give the impression of being simplistic about this; it's just that if HN is influential, the best way for that influence to function is if we neither focus directly on it nor try to exclude it, but leave it in peripheral vision.

There's a related issue, which is that the better HN gets at its core thing (curiosity), the more the audience grows in quantity and/or quality, and then the more people then want to use that audience for something else. Sometimes that's to promote their company or event, sometimes it's to bring attention to some other matter—maybe more important than what's actually on the front page here. The more those things become the focus, though, the worse HN becomes at the core thing, so there's a sort of paradox where the better it gets, the worse it gets.

What seems to work is to focus on the core but not too rigidly. This is a good because rigidity turns into predictability which is bad for curiosity anyhow.

Well, where to begin. First of all, YC left China. Second, there is no dearth of "anti Chinese" voices on HN, which is a problem, because nothing as crude and nasty as "anti-Chinese" belongs here. I wish people would stop and think about this for a second or two. Do we really want to hound people of Chinese descent out of this community? Is that the kind of human you/we want to be? Because that's the mob behavior this amounts to. From my perspective, Chinese people have as much of a right to participate here as you or I do, and people who have a problem with that are in the wrong. That's not because I favor China. I just favor decency.

Third, this site has a serious problem with nationalistic flamewar, in which people vent their anger against another country in cartoonish ways. That is wrong and stupid, but worst of all it is tedious. On a site dedicated to curiosity, anything tedious is off topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html