As a second-generation immigrant from an Asian country, I have to admit that I was ecstatic at hearing the news. For someone who's family was poor to the point of drinking rotting bone stew and foraging grass partly due to the queen refusing to decolonize until Britian lacked the military might to do so, the only reaction anyone in my close circle could have is positive. This is juxtaposed with the prevailing sentiment here where it's socially unacceptable to celebrate her death. I wonder if all the moralist harping about how one should never celebrate a person's death felt about Stalin, or how they would react to the death of Carmen Ortiz or Vladimir Putin.
I really enjoy my time lurking here in this small corner of the internet and I hope that the moderators here step it up and either 1. ban politically divisive topics or 2. moderate away both trite positive and negative comments.
It's true that there's an asymmetry in that it's much easier for the people making positive comments not to break the site guidelines. In a way that's not fair—but it applies to all threads equally, regardless of whether the topic is monarchy or something else. It's also an unfairness we can't do much about—it's intrinsic to the problem of how to operate this forum.
We do try to make special allowances for negative comments that break the site guidelines but also include enough information to explain why the person feels the way they do, in a way other commenters can learn from. I did that in a few cases in this thread. What we don't make special allowances for is garden-variety flamewar, which there was also a ton of in this thread.
If you see comments that did not break the site guidelines but were moderated anyhow, that's bad and I'd like to see links so we can correct our mistakes (or, in the case of user flags, user mistakes). Mistakes are inevitable when trying to moderate threads with 1500 comments or whatever; moderation is guesswork, and hasty guesswork at that. But we're always willing to take a second look, and when we do see a mistake, to acknowledge it and fix it.
To give an extreme example, these two comments in different threads are basically the same in terms of sentiment, prose and effect, however, one criticizes the CCP for their genocide of Uighurs, and the other criticizes the Queen. The difference here is one comment is at the top of the discussion while the other got the user banned.[0][1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881093
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32770904
The "likeliest explanation" of ignorance for [0] here doesn't hold since moderation has posted comments on the topic and again, it's the top comment of an extremely popular thread.
Here are some more examples of popular but off-topic for HN comments against Putin and Cloudflare respectively.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6371615
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32707053
and their equivalents in this thread:
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32771398
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769645
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769550
Dang, a million kudos to you for curating the site, but this topic has been an absolute train-wreck and I hope you can at least take it off the front page.