Of course it is. The topic is hip-hop livestreams, not race war. The article contained a phrase that some people found provocative—does that mean we should change the topic to the provocation and have a big argument about it? On HN, the answer is no. If you've read the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), that should be obvious.

When I happened on this thread, it had been upvoted to the top and was choking out all discussion on the smaller, more obscure topic. That's a failure mode for HN.

When an article contains a provocation, flamewars don't start themselves. Someone has to import the provocation into the thread and start reacting to it here. From an HN perspective, that's the original sin - not the provocation itself. If we just left it in its original habitat and ignored it, nothing bad would happen.

Online discussion tends to gravitate to the few hottest, angriest, and most generic themes. Something about the mind gets stuck on those and wants to repeat them over and over. This is exciting in one way but it's not interesting in HN's sense of the word. Therefore it's off topic here. Threads like this one should be like a spaceship traveling to a little-known planet that hasn't been visited much. For that, we need to steer clear of black holes.

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