Comment by Karrot_Kream

> IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.

Partially, but I think these are all symptoms for a more fundamental root cause: HN is just comprised of too many emotional, passionate users with fundamentally differing beliefs.

The usual song and dance with flagging goes something like the following with cryptocurrency:

1. User posts cryptocurrency article

2. People who passionately hate cryptocurrency start adding in emotional comments about how they hate it.

3. People who want to fight this passionate hate respond in kind.

4. The thread turns into a giant argument where nobody is willing to concede anything and everyone is just shouting at each other.

5. Either the flamewar detector kicks in (as it should) or everyone not in the thread tires of the shouting and flags it.

That's fine but regrettable when limited to some topics like crypto. But it's happening with social media company earnings reports, layoff posts, RTO discussions, posts about Musk, autonomous vehicles, and on and on.

dang (and the mod team?) are doing great work, but this is despite the feeling I have that HN is barely being held together into a cohesive community, and I'm struggling to even use the word "community" here. I feel the temperature of discussions has gotten a lot hotter here than it used to be and some basic work I've done with sentiment classifiers on comments here mirrors my perspective.

I just don't think a single community can handle so many passionate, opposed groups. It bubbles up by proxy in these sorts of flagging wars where so many articles get bumped off the page due to the inability of the community to discuss it well. Maybe the solution is to just discuss software as some people really want, but even then you get massive flamewars over things like Rust async. Even with interesting topics like VR posts, the overall temperature of the comments here is high enough that I've stopped bothering to comment as much as I used to.