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Have you been to any thread which mentions say China, India or several other topics?

You will see a lot of toxicity and you can find several deleted or heavily downvoted comments.

As even HN front page and commenr section is algorithmic. Vote brigading happens here as well for posts and comments.

The HN algorithm will de-front page stories where the comment section starts looking like a flame war. If you look up the stories which were removed from the front page, there is quite a bit of toxicity in the comments.

I personally like that they try to play down controversies instead of optimizing for engagement from them.

Yeah, they do and they get called out for censoring as well. People complain that their voice was suppressed. HN is a small community so this thing doesn't blow up.

Imagine a big social media platform doing it. Just because some topic became a flamewar if it gets removed, one party will blow it up as them being censored. When these posts are started by your ruling lawmakers, it can even be cited as contempt. It is an extremely tricky thing for big social media platforms to moderate content.

Thousands of years of tribalistic evolution can't be removed in just a few decades, this is a lot on how humans interact.

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