(Also, the submitter did a fine job of rewriting the title to be less baity, as the site guidelines request: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Thanks GavCo!)
It's true that https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=telegraph.co.uk contains a lot of ideological battle articles that probably fall below the 'interesting' line. For that reason, that domain has a penalty on it—a medium-weight penalty that we put on every site in this category, regardless of which ideology they support.
However, it does look like there have been other good articles from this domain. For example:
So I'd say this domain is a good example of the kind that we'd penalize but not ban, and try to turn off the penalty when the occasionally genuinely interesting article does show up.
There's no single doc. We keep https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html at the level of principles, not practices, because trying to compile a complete doc would be nightmarishly long and then no one would read it (except maybe the litigious types looking for loopholes). It's for similar reasons that we don't publish a full moderation log.
There is tons of information about basically everything we do embedded in my moderation comments but one has to use HN Search to find it (that's why I link to HN search so often). One of these years I might try to wrangle a bunch of those into a bunch of essay-style commentaries, if only because they would be easier to link to and would lighten the load of always having to explain the same things.
We're transparent in the sense of always trying to answer questions, though.
Comments by users can get manually unflagged by mods but I don't think there's a software way to do that. Flagkilled posts, though, can get unkilled by user vouches (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.
Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
I don't know what HN's internal database is, but it seems like it could be a simple query or set of queries to determine if [flagged] is being used by a group of people as a way of censoring comments they don't agree with. After all, they're not required to justify their flag.
Some simple statistics would answer this question. For instance, in "sometimes turn flags off" what percentage of the time does that happen?
We do look at that sort of thing but I wouldn't say it's straightforward to determine because we don't have access to people's intent.
We turn flags off a small percentage of the time. I don't know how small because although we log the flagging history, we don't keep it in a form that's easy to compute.
Sometimes it does! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850886 is superb - in my book, that's above the "one has no right to expect a comment of this quality on an internet forum" line.
You're right about raging and soapboxes of course. Unfortunately, angry repetition is in far greater supply than excellent comments sharing rare information. But this is an internet problem and indeed a human problem in general. We try to moderate in favor of the good posts as best we can. It's not clear how to do it much better.
The current article, I would say, easily clears the bar for interestingness on HN, despite its culture war aspect. Interestingness is the thing we care about here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
(Also, the submitter did a fine job of rewriting the title to be less baity, as the site guidelines request: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Thanks GavCo!)
It's true that https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=telegraph.co.uk contains a lot of ideological battle articles that probably fall below the 'interesting' line. For that reason, that domain has a penalty on it—a medium-weight penalty that we put on every site in this category, regardless of which ideology they support.
However, it does look like there have been other good articles from this domain. For example:
Elephants born without tusks in ‘evolutionary response’ to poachers (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33862385 - Dec 2022 (128 comments)
So I'd say this domain is a good example of the kind that we'd penalize but not ban, and try to turn off the penalty when the occasionally genuinely interesting article does show up.