I'd say it's a fascinating social manipulation, but mostly it just satisfies my own intellectual curiosity.
The HN guidelines on what to submit:
> On-Topic: 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.
The HN guidelines on asking why something was posted:
> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
It might be worth reading through the HN Guidelines. They're pretty concise:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can't find a guideline that's meta enough to tell me not to mention the guidelines, but I've blundered in worse ways before.
