The alternative is that there's enough people on here who find it uncomfortable when the spotlight is turned on the misogyny and racism that they share, that they flag this kind of article every single time one comes up. It's embarrassing for the community, because tech is deeply toxic and HN, arguably the biggest, most respected tech community online, shuts down every discussion of that toxicity among us. Every time this happens, I lose a little more respect for my fellow HN users, and care less about getting downvoted for calling it out.
That's far from accurate. There have been many major discussions.
It's true that some people feel that those topics are underrepresented, but that's because every topic is felt to be underrepresented, including the most common topics. It seems to be a consequence of frontpage space being such a scarce resource [1]. Sometimes people even end up with the idea that the most-commonly-discussed topics are actually being "aggressively removed from discussion" [2].
It's true that users sometimes flag articles that don't deserve to be flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on those. We don't always do that, because not every article on a given topic (e.g. misogyny or racism) is equally likely to support a meaningful discussion.
