Yes, I'm a moderator here. I'm sure you have good reasons for holding your view, but I can tell you for a fact that HN has many Indian users who disagree with you and the GP, feel just as strongly as you do, and will respond to that sort of provocation by lashing back and making the thread worse. If you don't believe me, look down the thread. If you don't think we moderate those responses as well, look down the thread again.
Provocations that are likely to lead to flamewar are called flamebait, so that's exactly what that was. Since the topic was national, I referred to it as nationalistic flamebait. Some of you seem to be reacting as if I had called the statement untrue, or sided against it. Of course I didn't. I know nothing about how the Indian justice system compares to that in other countries. You know about India; I know about Hacker News.
It's extremely common for people to assume that the mods must be taking the other side when they moderate a comment. The irony is that both sides think this. It's an illusion, but a strong one, and it makes people feel angry and justified in accusing us of abusing them. Since all sides do this, we get fired on from all angles. We become a sort of proxy for everyone's enemies in all the deep conflicts that exist in the worlds of HN users [1, 2]. Actually, we're simply trying to persuade users here to follow the site guidelines regardless of how right they are on a topic or how wrong someone else is, and regardless of how strongly they feel. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make a point of practicing these rules in the future? They're designed to prevent this place from destroying itself, the way past internet forums have tended to do. Note this one, for example:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Had the GP followed that when raising the topic of the Indian justice system, we could not only have avoided a flamewar and a crash into offtopicness, but their own point would have been stronger.
Provocations that are likely to lead to flamewar are called flamebait, so that's exactly what that was. Since the topic was national, I referred to it as nationalistic flamebait. Some of you seem to be reacting as if I had called the statement untrue, or sided against it. Of course I didn't. I know nothing about how the Indian justice system compares to that in other countries. You know about India; I know about Hacker News.
It's extremely common for people to assume that the mods must be taking the other side when they moderate a comment. The irony is that both sides think this. It's an illusion, but a strong one, and it makes people feel angry and justified in accusing us of abusing them. Since all sides do this, we get fired on from all angles. We become a sort of proxy for everyone's enemies in all the deep conflicts that exist in the worlds of HN users [1, 2]. Actually, we're simply trying to persuade users here to follow the site guidelines regardless of how right they are on a topic or how wrong someone else is, and regardless of how strongly they feel. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make a point of practicing these rules in the future? They're designed to prevent this place from destroying itself, the way past internet forums have tended to do. Note this one, for example:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Had the GP followed that when raising the topic of the Indian justice system, we could not only have avoided a flamewar and a crash into offtopicness, but their own point would have been stronger.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect