Looks like HN will need an "unfairly flagged" button to counter the organized cleaner squads who use it to bury stories...
I don't see how this place has any obligation to host flamewars that destroy it, any more than a building has an obligation to let a fire burn it down. On the contrary, we have a duty not to burn down, and need to do more to prevent it. We've been tirelessly asking HN commenters to please not destroy the commons for years, but the users posting in these threads are doing it more, and worse. Tireless asking is clearly insufficient, and from my perspective we could use more flags, not fewer.
Going directly to internet failure mode doesn't help anyone, let alone oppressed peoples. Moreover, if you see as much of this as I do, it becomes painfully obvious what these angry arguments are really about: highly-activated tribal emotion. In that sense they are an expression of the problem, not any step toward solution.
I posted about this earlier today, if anyone wants more explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365
But if the purpose of allowing this is as another indirect method for keeping flamewars off HN, then I agree that it's an acceptable compromise.
I agree in about 95% of cases. There are certainly lots of threads on HN lately that descend into nothing but unhelpful, petty emotional arguments. I try (with mixed success) to avoid most of those myself.
But with respect, this is not one of them. This isn't about iOS vs Android, or FP vs OOP, or regulation vs the free market. This is a cut-and-dry moral travesty, and I think the allegation in the GP (which of course we can't know for sure with our limited window into the HN metrics) was that the "flame war" in this case may only exist as a result of artificial and coordinated action by a third party. This type of thing is well-documented on other social sites; it's not hard to imagine it happening here.
If that didn't happen, I don't think anybody would continue to ask for intervention.
The core problem is that because we're tribal creatures it's difficult for us to acknowledge that other human beings have different backgrounds and different views than we do. It gets even harder when they're right beside us (albeit virtually) arguing fiercely for views which seem monstrous to us [1]. That's why we're prone to invent explanations of bad faith. The majority invents one sort of explanation (spies and agents are among us) while the minority invents a different sort (you just hate people like me), but both are textbook examples of cognitive dissonance.
[1] I wrote a longer explanation of this here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098, and there are plenty more explanations at links like these:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...