I'm not claiming consistency. For one thing, we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. If you see a particularly bad post get away without moderation, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We can't be consistent about what we don't see.
There are a ton of other considerations, though, and it gets complicated quickly. I'm always happy to discuss specific cases, but general arguments are another matter. Sometimes it feels like people want us to make general arguments so they can find exceptions and then say things like "aha" and "your obvious bias" and "figures". But we don't have general policies about such complicated things. We have basic principles and that's it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If you don't think we've been trying to reduce nationalistic flamewar about China and Russia, you could try looking at HN threads on those topics. I don't know anything I've been working at harder lately. On the other hand, there are many more of those, especially on China, so cf. the first paragraph above.
If so, then maybe you can explain why you didn't change "Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash" and "A private spacecraft from Israel will attempt a moon landing Thursday" to "Private Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash" and "A private spacecraft will attempt a moon landing Thursday" respectively?
I think your attempt at reducing nationalistic flame wars is very misguided, because I want to read what people think. If HN readers want to flame each other then I would like to have the chance to read the flames even if I'd likely scroll past them. But if you are going to do it, at least be consistent.
In one case I didn't see the article and in the other it didn't cross my mind. But also, that topic isn't so highly charged, and I didn't see nationalistic flamewar getting in there.
You're asking for a level of consistency in moderation that we can't deliver. I'd have to hold far more information in my head to come up with a consistent set of principles that would cover everything we do. Such a set would be inordinately complicated and impossible to explain or defend, so what would be the point.
> I want to read what people think.
Me too. But you can't read everything people think, because comments influence what gets posted in response. If a discussion becomes a flamewar, you're going to get the angry thoughts of the flamers, but lose the thoughts of those the flames drive away. It's a tradeoff—we can't have both. On HN the non-flamey, thoughtful comments take precedence, because that's the only way to optimize for HN remaining interesting. This is one area where I think we really are consistent, or at least I hope we are.
Look at it this way: each post changes the kind of site HN is. The container isn't static—it's altered by what people add to it. Our goal is optimize that container for curiosity. This is a global optimization problem, so it's important not to get distracted by local optima. Our experience with things like nationalistic flames is that while such comments are sometimes interesting (and certainly the topics are of great world significance), the type of discussion they lead to is reliably worse. What we do is: extrapolate the vector of a given comment and ask what its shaping influence is on the site as a whole. Is it to make HN more, or less, interesting? Where more, we either do nothing or steer towards; where less, we steer away. In the case of flamewars, steering away means doing things to prevent the flames from spreading. There are various tools for that—digging trenches, pouring water, etc. Picking which to use where is more of an art and I wouldn't say we're particularly consistent on that level. But the fundamental principle is very consistent—there's only one, and it motivates literally everything we do here.
> In one case I didn't see the article and in the other it didn't cross my mind. But also, that topic isn't so highly charged, and I didn't see nationalistic flamewar getting in there.
They are right there, in light-gray color at the bottom of the respective articles. Now that you have been made aware for the problem, will you change those articles' titles? I don't understand how you can claim one title is "baitsy" while the other to examples are not.
But isn't it also baity to use 'used to'. My first reaction now was that Whatsapp itself has been inserting spyware into their phone calls, but no longer is (=used to), yet after reading the (non-paywalled) article I now see that a vulnerability in their signaling protocol has been used by others (=used to) to allow remote code injection.
Removing the creator of the spyware part from the title now causes the blame of the spyware to shift to Whatsapp, which is incorrect.
