[dang]

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. There's substantive material to discuss here, but you've unfortunately poured firestarter over it (e.g. snark and flamey rhetoric). When people do this, the results are predictable and dismal—especially when the material is flammable to begin with. That's why the site guidelines explicitly ask you not to post this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In fact, you should do the opposite: add flame retardant, i.e. use neutral language, narrow the scope of your claims to what the substance supports, edit out grand provocation.

[cbHXBY1D]

> Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar.

Dang, question: how is this nationalistic? It seems to me the opposite - it's pointing out the media, Reddit, and this site's blatant (IMO sinophobic) double standard.

[dang]

The issue is the expected value of the subthread. Is it predictable that a comment would blow up into a flamewar? If so, then it was flamebait. In this case the flamebait was nationalistic because the topic was in the 'nations' bucket.

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

Adding snark and flamey rhetoric to generalizations about nations (and group views of nations) is guaranteed to evoke worse from others and put a thread into a downward spiral. The GP spawned 140+ comments, almost 80% of the entire page, and the discussion is between poor and terrible. It's full of mechanical repetition of the same angry things people say everywhere the same trigger comes up ("China is a totalitarian state", "China lied about literally EVERYTHING"). Indignation plus repetition is the worst combo for HN. Meanwhile the other 20% of the discussion on this article is actually not bad. That is the difference between provoking a flamewar vs. not. It's not cool, and the root comment is most responsible for it.

In case it helps, I've spent many hours telling HN users that they can't post inflammatory rhetoric about or against China or Chinese people.

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

[ksk]

Unfortunately for you, people have been using neutral language to start daily flame-wars and getting away with it.

[dang]

It's easy to make grand claims like that. Where are the links? It's not ok for anyone to start flamewars on HN, and lord knows I spend enough of my life telling people so.

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. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [e-mail].

[ksk]

Oh, I meant it half in jest. I definitely don't want your job ;)

For e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703219

Commenter labels a legitimate company as "skeezy", uses needlessly insulting language to polarize discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703881

Commenter uses the usual government trope to polarize discussion.

[dang]

Ah ok! Actually I mostly agree with you about those comments. They lead to predictably worse discussion. However, they're in a different category than the more egregious kind that we post moderation responses to.