When we leave them "untouched" they disappear rapidly due to community flags and automatic flamewar penalties. The only way for us to give them exposure is "touch" them – to override the flags and flamewar penalties (i.e., push the threads back up onto the front page), then spend hours poring through the comments to try to minimise the effects of the most inflammatory ones. Still, we do it often, but only when the story has "significant new information" which is always the test of whether a story belongs on HN.
As a comment: you keep coming at us with these accusations but don't seem to ever mention a specific news story that you think should have had a prominent discussion here but didn't.
