[dang]

It's simply the practical question of what type of site HN is trying to be. We want curious conversation, not people bashing each other, which is what flamebait leads to.

Commenters who get too sure of their moral positions tend to do a lot of this. I'm not saying the moral positions are wrong (I probably agree a lot of the time, certainly Sinead did a courageous thing, etc. etc.). But the quality of discussion this leads to is predictably poor, evokes worse from others, and tends to go straight to the bottom of the internet barrel. We're trying to not get sucked completely into that muck here—a difficult task to even partly achieve, so we need everyone's help.

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

[fknorangesite]

I mostly like the moderation on this site, but I think you're missing the mark on this one.

The man - and the institution - facilitated and covered up the abuse and rape of countless children. Calling him a bastard seems pretty small potatoes for you to start clutching your pearls over.

[dang]

One has to distinguish the importance of a topic from the quality of internet conversation about it. We moderate for the latter, not the former. Most important topics, including most atrocities, don't make HN's front page, and most things that do make the front page are neither important nor an atrocity.

People tend to respond to activating topics with intense pre-existing feelings. That's understandable—I'm not criticizing it and it would be futile to try to change it. But it does not make for curious conversation, which is what HN is for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Curious conversation is about learning new things, changing one's orientation, and so on. That's one reason why the best HN threads tend to have a whimsical aspect—when a topic isn't high-stakes and one doesn't have a pre-existing position about it, curiosity is the natural state. Not so much otherwise.