Are comments about the title of articles offtopic? Because sometimes comments that discuss titles, without being inflammatory, are flagged, and sometimes they aren't.
I suppose they are in principle, but we don't have an explicit rule against them, and user passions around titles burn so hot that it wouldn't make a difference if we did. There are also so many of them that you're not likely to see consistency around what gets flagged vs. not. Are there specific links we could look at?
Thanks for replying. I was thinking about the "Make X Y Again" types of article that, intentionally or not, invites offtopic discussion.
The original comment from simonw (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23137531) originally did not have many comments but was already flagged when I saw it first, which was strange to me because the comment basically says "this is a bad title (it distracts from the content), don't do that".
This is quite a reasonable comment to me.
So under that comment are many exchanges that may or may not be offtopic, but I was curious in particular about why that parent comment was flagged, and what recourse users have when something is flagged but maybe shouldn't (wasn't there a "vouch" action?). My opinion is that if the submission itself brings political subject into light, even indirectly, it is unfair to flag political comments as offtopic.
A bunch of users flagged that comment. We can only guess why users flag things, but my guess is that in this case they thought it was a specimen of the very distraction it was worrying about.
I agree that it's probably what they think. My opinion is that flagging is unecessary in that case since people can already downvote and hide distracting comments.