[grawprog]

I don't really understand the downvotes and reactions of the other commenters to the gp's post. There's a whole bunch of studies showing there's less incentive to find cures opposed to ongoing treatments under for profit health systems.

On a website where products as a service are discussed regularly i'm confused as to how the parallels between that and profit driven 'healthcare as a service' are ignored or looked at with hostility.

[Merman_Mike]

.

[dang]

It was a generic ideological flamewar tangent. That includes several good reasons for downvoting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[grawprog]

Thanks for pointing that out. Sorry for adding to an offtopic, flamewar inspiring subthread. I hoped providing some sources for the GP's comment might spur on some more productive discussion and i genuinely thought the other commenter was asking in good faith about sources for discussion. I was also genuinely curious as to the harsh reaction

I do see now the flamewar aspect to it and didn't really stop to consider the initial topic of the article when I responded. I was just trying to focus on the actual topic of the commenter's statement and kinda got lost in searching up articles. I was hoping to maybe bring some data and information into the discussion that might steer it in a more productive direction.

It is an issue that could productively be discussed. It seems it didn't end up being the case though and probably wasn't the most appropriate comment thread to do so on.

[dang]

Thanks—I appreciate that! We all underestimate how provocative our posts will end up being, usually by a good 10x. I struggle with this daily.

I think it's because in our mind, the comment is blended together with the intention behind the comment, which is usually benign. We take our intent for granted and assume it will come across, but of course the people who read it have no direct access to that intent, and often it doesn't come across.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[Merman_Mike]

.

[just gonna stop commenting on this site]

[dang]

> Is the flamewar tangent part of this the comment on capitalism or "Capitalized medicine"? Doesn't really seem flamie to me but obviously others disagree.

The problem is the generic ideological tangent. You can perhaps (maybe!) imagine a substantive article and thread on the economics of cures vs. treatments. But that would require different initial conditions—primarily an interesting, informative article that brought lots of relevant information. Relevant information is flame retardant.

The situation is different when the topic is "FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection" and the comment is swerving generically into "capitalized medicine". Generic tangents, especially when the impetus is snarky or unsubstantive, make threads reliable less interesting, and generic ideological tangents almost always turn into flamewars. The reason is that there's very little specific information to discuss—that's the meaning of "generic".

Off-topic tangents can be great when they're unpredictable and curious, but generic tangents are the opposite of that. They're more like getting sucked into the gravitational field of a much larger body, if not a black hole, that pulls all nearby topics toward itself and renders them all the same. Avoiding repetition is the biggest problem that a forum like HN—dedicated to curiosity—actually has, so it's a big deal: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

I hope this helps explain things a bit. There are lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... also, but you'll unfortunately—and ironically—have to wade through some generic repetition to find the interesting bits.

[lwhi]

More time has been spent discussing the nature of flamewars.

A little ironic perhaps ..

[dang]

If you mean in this case, that may be, but it's certainly not true in the general case.

Moderation comments have multiple functions. If it were just about this specific case it wouldn't be worth spending so much time on it, but they're also opportunities to explain the principles of this site to readers who might not have encountered those principles yet.

For those who do already know this stuff, it's true that such comments are tedious. I'm sorry about that. If it helps at all, they're even more tedious to write than they are to read.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[pvg]

A comment that spawns a lengthy subthread of meta trying to parse out what the commenter actually meant, why precisely they are being downvoted, etc, is bad. As is the subthread of meta.