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Comment by mw67 | Hacker News Reader

Was it the country whose name triggers automatic comment cancellation?

That's not a thing. What triggers moderation and/or banning is when accounts break the site guidelines by going into political/nationalistic/ideological flamewar, as they unfortunately often do on divisive topics.

I assume you're asking about Israel. HN Search shows about 170k comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... All of those are live. That's a far cry from "automatic cancellation".

If you meant some other country, it's easy enough to check this about any of them.

I think the problem is better stated as a large flagging contingent, rather than anything intrinsic to the site's code or official moderation. And the real problem is that it has an outsized chilling effect on substantive comments, which require putting in actual effort just to possibly be killed. From what I've observed comments/stories get a penalty from flags (before they actually end up [dead]) and this seems to be the actual objective - to stymie concrete discussion while a topic is popular.

Yeah. I was just replying to someone's personal political perspective (which met the HN post guidelines) that I partly agreed-disagreed with - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983014 - but after typing out my thoughts on it, I found that I couldn't post a reply to it because it has now been flagged. That's 15+ minutes of my time wasted. And their time wasted. Which as you pointed has a "chilling effect" on the whole discussion, and is the intent.

That's not even what I had meant, but yes damn I have been bitten by that same thing many times. Sometimes I reflect and go yeah I guess I was just going to be feeding the trolls. But other times there was really good faith discussion to be had. It's especially galling with the thread kills.

Yes, it's a problem. We do manually take flagging rights away from accounts that are abusing flags as a weapon of political battle (in any direction!) but whack-a-mole approaches aren't enough, and we probably need to get to something more systematic.

edit:wrong assumption

It was Azerbaijan: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/ex-bnd-chef-hanning-s...

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