You're missing that it's a dog whistle - we should not be nice. Look at this person's adjacent comments here.
It's not about being nice, but on Hacker News we operate according to guidelines and norms that have evolved over more than 15 years, which keep discussions focused on substance and prevent it from burning to the ground the way most online communities do.
Please do your part to make this place better not worse. The point you made above was a valid and valuable one, but the way you expressed it means its value is lost.
If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email. We have several ways of keeping discussion healthy here, but we need everyone to do their part.
"Both sides are the same"
> If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email.
My man - there are well known dog whistles and revisionist accounts of the slave trade in this very comment chain ... And yet the only one that gets flagged is mine. And even so based on what grounds - a flippant remark about Wikipedia being free? Forgive me if I don't take your commitment to "healthy" discourse seriously.
Your comments have been inflammatory and abusive from the very beginning of your participation in the thread, so of course you're attracting flags. But you're certainly not the only commenter getting flags in the thread.
All the feedback mechanisms we offer are here to help you if your intention is to contribute positively to the site. Votes, flags, vouches, email support. If you don't use them, you're in no position to claim that the system is biased against you.
Edit: I'm rate limited
> you're not doing your part to help
... I responded to a comment and pointed out a revisionist take. Did you scold that person too or just me? Do you get it now?
I'm sorry, but what? A quick look at this person's profile has tons of flagged comments on every page. None of it is pretty. I see rants about pretty much every non-White Christian group. You can't just ignore that.
But yeah, almostgotcaught is the one who needs a bollocking because he got a bit testy when the Nazi was goosestepping around ... :-/
The problem in this thread was that almostgotcaught posted multiple escalatory comments, then when I replied to them asking them to stop, which is just routine moderation here, they continued escalating and making swipes against HN's whole approach to moderation and assuming bad faith on our part, rather than doing what many others do and working constructively with us to help HN function better.
They've said elsewhere that they were very upset by the comments and I can understand that. It's a topic that's sensitive and is prone to get people upset. I could have been more considerate of that. It's hard to be considerate when your character is under attack for just doing the job that is expected of you and that you do the same way every day.
The biggest takeaway is that HN can't discuss topics like this without them descending into hellish flamewars, which is disappointing.
The core problem here wasn't @almostgotcaught, it was @typeofhuman. Maybe they could have handled it better, but it really wasn't that bad, and their sharp response really isn't the main problem here.
This is also why flagged comments should just disable replies to the entire thread by the way, instead of just the flagged comment.
I've been doing this work in various forms for a long time, and we've had cases before where dog-whistle comments have been posted, and, in the best instances the way they've been handled by the community has been anti-inflammatory and mature. That is, others reply with sober explanations about what's going on, and send emails to the moderators so we can know about them and take appropriate action (killing comments and banning users). In such cases, the issue was dealt with very effectively and without it turning into a huge meta-drama that gives it much more visibility than it needs to have.
This is ultimately the point I keep trying to make. HN's guidelines and feedback mechanisms are designed to deal with this stuff, and have a track record of dealing with this stuff very effectively when people use them properly, which most people do, most of the time. That could have happened in this case too. When people take matters into their own hands and wage war, everything breaks down.
If you looked at the adjacent comments you would immediately see a combination of "western christian values," and open pondering that "Epstein is an Israeli asset. Democrats and Republicans have loyalty to Israel." This alone is enough dog whistling for at least my neighborhood's dogs to start acting up.
To put it into terms that may hit closer to home:
Remember Vatican 2? you may have heard about it. pretty big deal, lots of changes in the catholic church, made a whole bunch of news, put the latin mass out to pasture and also pulled back on the doctrine of deicide, ruffled a lot of feathers, etc.
There are some people who yearn for the aesthetics and cultural heritage of the latin mass. They miss the funny words in a language they don't speak, the historical continuity of the latin liturgy, etc. For these types, it's purely innocent aesthetic yearning, mostly harmless.
There are also some people who both miss the latin mass and feel very strongly about the perfidy of the jews being a theologically important teaching. These anti-semitic sedevacantist types share the same information ecology with all of the more harmless latin mass types. Dog whistles are a tool that can be used to disambiguate between the two types of latin-mass-enjoyers.
Fetishizing "western christian values" communicates different things when one of the most prominent far-right groups, the proud boys, makes this a central doctrine. If a latin-mass-enjoyer were to tell me they deeply valued western christian values, before airing their favorite anti-semitic conspiracies, I'm likely to predict they're not into latin mass for purely aesthetic reasons.