However, if the moderation approach is going to change, I think it would be better to do so explicitly through changes to the site guidelines rather than in an ad-hoc way. I don't think that this article is covering an 'interesting _new_ phenomenon' (emph. mine) as discussed in the guidelines, and indeed most of the comments are talking about moderation policy or the conflict in general as opposed to the details presented in the article. Perhaps it would be better to have a thread explicitly focused on members of the community engaging with each other as individuals, such as a hypothetical 'Ask HN: How has conflict personally affected you?' or 'Ask HN: How/why have your views on this conflict changed over time?'
The stories that the article has to tell are important, but they aren't the thing that people are discussing here. And moderating submissions instead of explicitly discussion-focused posts invites some of the concerns about sourcing and bias that have been raised in other comments.