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I’d argue that the parent post you’re replying to is relatively positive and factual, and it’s the knee-jerk responses that it triggered that are the problem.

Now you can argue that this is why the parent post is a flamebait, but since the sole fact that Cuba is such a small, socialist country is why this vaccin is interesting in the first place, you may as well ban this vaccin from being discussed on HN entirely.

When a comment contains flamebait, which the GP obviously did, it bears responsibility for the knee-jerk responses that it triggers.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

> you may as well ban this vaccin from being discussed on HN entirely

I'm sorry, but that makes no sense to me. The situation seems rather simple: non-flamebait, non-flamewar discussion of the vaccine story is welcome. Flamebait and flamewar, about this story or any other story, is not.

I screenshot despegar's comment when it was the top one and sent it to my tech friends (with the implied meaning - see how useless HN has become, it's been overwhelmed by the ideologues, it's a write-off). So thanks for trying to defend the formerly great site.

And separately: in the last 5 years i took a break from the Silicon Valley and spent most of the time in Latin America, traveling and learning Spanish. Check my IP history. Had to deal with the medical system and with the so called "Cuban doctors" in various countries. The original comment completely distorts the factual truth about Cuban medicine.

Ok, but I'm not commenting about Cuba, for or against. I'm commenting only about internet flamewar dynamics. The comment would be the same if the political polarity were reversed, so it's a misreading to take it as ammunition in favor of any political position.

I find your language much more inflammatory than the comment you are referring to.

"Of course the real damage is caused more by the upvoters, not the original comment"

Original comment invited political flaming by throwing in the "great showing" jab at the end.

Except for the word "great" the entirety of that comment is factual, and as many pointed out, the embargo is the main reason why this piece of news is so remarkable. I fail to see the "invitation" to flame honestly. It's more about how the moderator interpreted the comment rather than what it's actually there.

It's possible to state factual things in a way that invites heat instead of light.

> I fail to see the "invitation" to flame honestly.

Many people will end up interpreting "A great showing for a small, socialist island nation under decades of embargo by hostile anti-communist forces." as "A great showing for a nation being oppressed and bullied for decades by the big bad US and its bully friends". And, well, the knee jerk reaction is to defend yourself if you think someone is accusing your country of bullying another country for no reason.

Wow, I think that interpretation says way more about the reader than the OP.

I hear you. Seeing HN threads on fire does that to me sometimes.

> I hear you.

Do you? Agreeing with parent implies that you consider your own comment to be highly inflammatory (and implicitly against HN code of conduct etc.). If that is the case, you can take it down or edit it with an apology.

NOTE: I'm not saying I agree with parent, just pointing what seems to me to be a logical necessity stemming from your agreement with parent.

"I hear you" doesn't mean "I agree with the maximalist interpretation of what you say". It means "we have common ground, and I'm willing to give something".

The problem with your logical inference is that you're applying binary logic and human interactions are profoundly non-binary.

I have just now read the edit of your parent comment. I appreciate your clarifications as well as your willingness to nuance your position.

I can't really imagine the amount of effort you have to put into keeping HN on track. I thank you for that as well.

I do however want to mention that the US cultural context is not always that apparent for a non-American (such as myself). My comments were made taking into account strictly the GP and your comment, not any pre-existing cultural context. Back where I'm from (broadly speaking the EU) simply mentioning that Cuba is socialist or that the embargo is anti-communist doesn't come across as particularly controversial or flame-bating.

I know that's true and I hear you :) - the challenge is to get a large community like this to understand and respect how differently things land among the different subgroups in the community. I mean, an internet forum is in one way an utterly trivial thing and at the same time, if we can really get this right it is actually a contribution to the practice of peace in the world, which is not a trivial thing at all. A strange incongruity.

I wrote about that here if you (or anyone) are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

Thanks for pointing to your extended comment.

I can say that in my case confronting people with wildly different political opinions has pushed me to become more dispassionate/detached in my replies, as well as to focus on the substance of the argument. I have started taking things more literally (which is probably what lead to our present conversation) and providing more precise and detailed rebuttals.

All of this I consider to be intellectual progress on my part, so to me HN has provided challenging and fruitful waters to swim in. For that, again, I am grateful :)

How is that off-topic? It's the whole reason the story is remarkable at all.

The flamewar it predictably produced is off topic. There are other ways of posting about this that don't lead to flamewars.

Please give an example of how they could have written it.

Another user gave such an example already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27654775

> A great showing for a small, socialist island nation under decades of embargo by hostile anti-communist forces.

Did they edit their post because there is nothing even remotely ideological or controversial in that statement?

We must be looking at this from different perspectives. From my perspective that sentence is ideological boilerplate, the sort that would appear in a political pamphlet. (That doesn't mean I disagree with it!) Because the audience here is extremely varied along many axes: ideological, geographical, you name it, that sort of rhetoric about a divisive topic is guaranteed to land as a provocation with certain sectors of the audience, and this is extremely likely to produce a flamewar. HN commenters are asked not to post comments that are extremely likely to produce flamewars. We all have that responsibility on a large, public, optionally anonymous internet forum dedicated to topics of intellectual curiosity (which is what HN is), because otherwise such a forum literally can't exist.

I still don't see it.

> A great showing

This part is subjective, so perhaps is the most problematic, but I don't think we normally react negatively to calling scientific achievements "great".

> for a small,

Factual.

> socialist

Factual (although I would have expected "communist").

> island nation

Factual.

> under decades of embargo

Factual.

> by hostile anti-communist

I think even pro-embargo folks would be ok with this description.

> forces.

Small problem here maybe?

It's trivial to write a flame-generating comment made entirely of facts, 'factual' isn't quite the defense against this you might think it is.

As pvg pointed out, "facts" are a red herring here. You can make non-factual statements that aren't flamewar and you can make factual statements that are. Sticking to "facts" is actually one of the favorite tricks of trolls (I'm not saying anyone was trolling in this case—it's just an instructive example) because then when you say "please don't troll" they can say "what part of my perfectly factual statement do you have a problem with". https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The problem with the flamebait sentence I was objecting to was twofold: (1) it was political rhetoric of precisely the kind you would read in a political publication or hear in a political broadcast, and (2) it took the thread on a generic ideological tangent, that is it replaced the topic of Cuban work on covid vaccines with a much larger, more general, and more inflammatory one. Yes, it's related; the word "tangent" implies that; but that's not enough. It reliably leads to much worse discussion, and predictably did so in this case. I've been trying to explain this to HN for many years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There's nothing different about the moderation practice in this case—it was utterly routine. But two things were different: (a) I wrote more hastily than I usually do and didn't calibrate my language very well; and (b) something about the specific question of Cuba appears to land differently with HN's internationally distributed community than most subjects do.

The items I labelled "Factual" are things like "island" or "small" -- I was very careful about highlighting the possibly controversial parts of that sentence.

However, the funny thing is that there was no ideological flame war in response to the comment. Why? Because there was nothing there that anyone even disagrees with or find inflammatory.

In fact, the only reactions have been to your (in my opinion) overreaction.

> there was no ideological flame war in response to the comment

To which comment? If you mean the original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27654110), that's quite wrong. The flamewar reactions were why I replied in the first place. Some of them are dead and/or collapsed now.

I am very pleased by the way you moderate discussions on HN in general, but I really think you are very wrong on this. It is pretty clear that you are only thinking about the US perspective on things.

I'm not doing anything different from what I do every day! Come to think of it, that would even be rather hard, after so much practice.

I sense that some people may be taking my comments as if they are expressing a perspective on the topic of Cuba. I'm not. My comments are strictly limited to internet forum dynamics, since that's what it's my job to deal with.

I assure you I'm not thinking from "the US perspective on things", but very much internationally. I believe this is a case of people in different parts of the world not understanding each other, and underestimating how differently the same statement can land elsewhere. (I wrote about that here, if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.) Of course it's easy to take the position, "The fault lies with the others; my perspective is the valid one," but the problem with that is that it's a recipe for flamewar at scale. That isn't in any of our interests because it destroys the capacity of this place to remain interesting.

People don't need to change their views in order to take this into account, but they do need to adjust to the presence of other people. Across the kind of differences that we're dealing with in a large international community like this, that is not easy.

Not sure parent should be considered as inflammatory as you take it to be. The core idea was that having 5 vaccines that performed well is a good showing for a small country, especially one that has been under heavy embargo for many decades.

If the GP had posted that sentence instead, it would of course have been fine. The problem is when it comes in the form of ideological boilerplate.

The following is the entirety of the GP, quoted here for ease of access:

> Cuba actually has 5 vaccine candidates, and 2 of them have greater than 90% effectiveness. A great showing for a small, socialist island nation under decades of embargo by hostile anti-communist forces.

Which part is ideological boilerplate? Is it false that Cuba is a small, socialist island nation? Is it false that it has been under decades of embargo? Is it false that the forces that are imposing the embargo (mainly the US) are hostile to Cuba and anti-communist?

NOTE: You should not infer any agreement or disagreement to GP from my comment. I simply find it to be literally, factually correct. If it isn't please point me to sources that invalidate any of the factual points I mentioned.

Ideological boilerplate doesn't mean "not true".

It does seem to imply that. If the statements are simply factually true, what makes them ideological? Is it merely typing the words socialist and communist?

Despegar's comment gets to the heart of why the Cuban vaccine is interesting. Nobody would be surprised if a nation with open trade with the US could manufacture something at this quality level; most of them are manufacturing Pifzer and Moderna.

Good point, but it doesn't matter because the ideological bullhorn drowns that out and guarantees a flamewar. Just look at the responses it generated. We made it to "you want all the Jews in Israel to die" in three hops.

That seems to have less to do with what Despegar actually wrote - which is the focus of your criticism - and more to do with the increasingly conspiratorial "conservative" (i.e. memetic-right) portion of its audience HN's moderation has tolerated over the years. (The shift is not specific to HN, but different moderation policies could have provided better outcomes, and have in other fora.)

Everyone thinks the problem is caused by the people they disagree with. After dealing with literally hundreds of thousands of HN comments I can tell you that experience has taught me entirely otherwise.

This goes along with the view that the forum would be a peaceful and productive place if only those people (the ones I disagree with) were moderated and banned, and therefore it is the moderators' fault when flamewars happen on HN. Much as I'm deeply interested in improving as a moderator, I don't think this view is realistic. In fact the solution is in the opposite direction: less blaming of the others, more effort to see one's own contributions more clearly. Needless to say this applies irrespective of political or ideological or geographical identification.

(And yes, I need to do more of this too - for example it's clear that I could have handled this particular case much better. I was hasty and (ironically?) a little inflamed myself, not because of anything to do with Cuba or vaccines but because I didn't want to spend a second afternoon in a row dealing with a really nasty political flamewar. As a result I created a meta version of the same thing. Such lessons are expensive, which is fortunate.)

p.s. I see that your replies are getting rate-limited. That doesn't seem fair, so I'll turn that off for now. In return I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from this sort of destructive comment in the future: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26848534. That's why we rate limit accounts. Actually you've done so much of that that we could easily have banned you and a rate limit was a mild response; but I don't want to throttle anyone from responding to me in a discussion about moderation.

> we could easily have banned you

"oh no"

(You're not really engaging the points raised and I find the low-key threat hilarious, so no, I won't be responding further.)

Daniel, the truth of the matter is that "you want all the Jews in Israel to die" type of post can, and is being thrown everywhere completely regardless of the merit of original conversation.

And yes, it's a perfect tactic to sink any topic on a site with any kind of automoderation.

You cannot properly discuss anything moderately controversial if any topic can get framed, and sunk as "flamebait" because moderately controversial topics are "flamebait".

People have heated discussions about matters of ideology, that's the very obvious truth of life.

The more important is the matter, the more, longer, louder, and more emotionally people will argue.

That's an argument for unmoderated flamewar. That's not what HN is. If you're imagining a version of HN that is "like the current HN, but without the current moderation practices," you'll have to forgive me for considering that a fantasy.

There's also no evidence that anybody said that as a "discussion sinking" tactic. On the contrary, the simplest explanation easily applies: people responded to flamebait with more flamebait, which cascaded into flamewar. This is one of the most common phenomena that exists here, and one doesn't need sinister constructs to understand it.

I am not calling for it, what I told is topics turning into flamewar regardless of merits of original conversation, and that any important topic sinks very quickly.

That Cuba is ruled by a communist party is, unfortunately, relevant to this conversation: there is a significant chance the claimed results are pure fabrication. First line of the article: "Cuba's health authorities said this week the domestically produced Abdala vaccine has proven to be 92% effective against the coronavirus in clinical trials.".

Personally, I hope this is one of the rare times when communist authorities tell the truth. Or hopefully Cuba 2020 has a different relation to the truth than Eastern Europe 1980. But count me skeptical until independent trials confirm the results.

People that lived under a communist party regime learned the hard way that communist regimes engage routinely in fake data. From 99% elections to the incessant claims that the quality of life is superior to the "decadent capitalist West", when reality on the field looks like this: https://dustyoldthing.com/inside-soviet-grocery-store.