[dang]

We've asked you repeatedly to stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. If you can't or won't stop, we're going to have to ban you.

(No, that isn't a political position, it's a site guidelines position. Please follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

[zo1]

True, but a lot of the time it appears to people that the "site guidelines" are not applied in a blanket fashion.

[dang]

They definitely aren't, because we don't read everything that gets posted here, or even close to everything. There's far too much.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [e-mail].

[Avamander]

If genocide is unsubstantiated, can he just bring up the organ harvesting?

[dang]

Bringing that up in a thread about tokamak reactors would almost certainly break the site guideline against going on flamewar tangents.

I know that can seem arbitrary to people who have strong feelings on the topic, but it follows from HN's first principle: intellectual curiosity. We have had hundreds of generic flamewars about China. Will yet another one gratify anybody's intellectual curiosity? Of course not, because nothing new can be said about any of it. Everyone who cares about these arguments has already heard all of the lines and probably recited half of them. The only thing left to do is invent even nastier variations of the same thing. That's why flamewars get hotter as they become more predictable.

The root phenomenon is: we can have intellectual curiosity or indignation but not both. On HN, we choose curiosity. That means indignation needs to be actively contained, for the same reason that fire does.

If you want to see previous explanations about this, there are tons:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...