Is it due to HN policy? I guess they're subjective and ideological, and prone to starting arguments rather than debates.
Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
I'm honestly just curious as a conscientious internet citizen lol
[dead] is different than [flagged][dead]. [dead]-only (no [flagged]) means they're auto-dead, they aren't killed by someone reviewing the comments (moderator or users flagging). One of the two commenters was shadow banned years ago but still gets vouched for occasionally (including by me at times). The other one was shadow banned (looked through their history) 11 days ago, with a comment from dang at the time stating as much. They also get vouched for on occasion, based on their comment history.
> Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
dang does usually respond to people with something like that first, then for people who get repeatedly flagged or repeatedly engage in certain kinds of behavior, he bans them.
Removing moderation or voting systems (simple chronological comment sorting) creates another set of issues so this problem can't be solved without entirely changing discussion formats
No, it's not. Because the same magnification effect causes the causal, simple and correct sounding to float to the top and the nuanced "<signs deeply> so I dealt with this for 20yr and here's the deal" takes that nobody wants to hear because they're not simple and easy wind up at the bottom but above the flagrantly wrong crap and the trolls.
There's a reason that nothing with real stakes adopts this format and technical discussions that matter still mostly happen in some sort of threaded format that doesn't allow voting or any sort of drive-by low effort interaction to effect much.
Format like this is good for driving interaction, which is why public facing websites use it for their comment sections.
Otherwise, the only thing that comes to mind is StackOverflow functionality where OP can mark a single answer as "accepted" and push it to the top instantly (which obv. wouldn't translate well to general discussions).
Just to add one point, flagged comments are mostly flagged by users (as opposed to mods). We can only guess why users flag things, but from looking at a sample in the current thread it's probably because they're mostly flamewar-style comments and/or political-battle style comments (or both). Those aren't good for HN because what we want here is curious, thoughtful conversation.
the four disagreements apply to a comment section as well: the comment is factually wrong, the comment lacks information, the comment. draws a different conclusion from the same set of information, or the comment is philosophically opposed to my viewpoint. For an online comment system, spam is another category.