> Off topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

So you’re incorrect. HN isn’t off bounds for all political posts, but yes, they do have to have an “interesting new phenomenon”.

The U.S. sanctioning a decades old technology collective is clearly new. Whether it’s “interesting” I can’t speak to because that’s subjective to every individual, but that’s where the useful voting system comes in.

Have you ever opened the website of any B2B software/services provider? By your logic, they're all the most suspicious people on earth, because none of them seem to be able to explain what they actually do.

You're getting a negative response because ignoring that and implying that they're secretly doing sketchy things makes it look like you're doing bad faith criticism