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.
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.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962