We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
In his defense, all technology is an instrument of political and ideological battle. If the site admins really want to enforce that guideline, then we should not be discussing current events here.
I hear you, and I've been modded myself. But the guidelines provided a damping effect that allows for conversations to occur which would quickly spin out of control otherwise.
I agree, I take issue with the guideline on its own, not that it was applied in this case. Although I think this could be better justification for the flagging of that comment:
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
You might be misreading that guideline. It's not trying to exclude political discussion—only one form of it.
Technological and political topics overlap (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). That's why politics has never been excluded from HN (other than an experiment we once briefly tried and quickly rolled back). Maybe your formulation of that overlap is the right one, maybe others are better, but they all point to the same fundamental, which we agree on. HN has always, or nearly always, hosted a certain amount of political discussion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 for some history).
The distinction that guideline attempts to draw is not "political vs. apolitical", but rather between two different forms of discussion: discussion whose purpose is communication and discussion whose purpose is battle. These are remarkably different in practice: one seeks to hear and learn from the other, one seeks to defeat and destroy the other. People are generally in very different states when they're doing those two things. It's not primarily a distinction of views; whatever your views are, you can either do battle or do communication about them, depending on what state you're in and what your intention is.
By now, we have a lot of experience with moderating the site according to this distinction, and if there's a better way to do it, I'd love to know what it is. If you want to take a look at past explanations, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... are good entrypoints. If after reading that material, you or anyone still have a question that hasn't been answered yet, I'd like to know what it is. And if you know a better way for HN moderation to relate to political topics, I'd really like to know what it is. Just make sure you've familiarized yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.
Thanks for the clarification. It was non-obvious to me at first reading, but I can see the interpretation you outline now.
>And if you know a better way for HN moderation to relate to political topics, I'd really like to know what it is.
I would point out the /r/AskHistorians and /r/PoliticalDiscussion communities, which are surprisingly civil (at least for reddit). The latter community has guidelines for what makes a successful submission: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/wiki/posts . Both are mainly question driven, which I find refreshing. When we are reading news articles or research, the discussion can be extra reactionary and hyper-focused on the source and author, minor gaps in a study's coverage, or the specific circumstances of the story.
