You mean "don't disagree with the narrative".

There's no flame in what he's saying. There is also no way he is encouraging others to flame.

He's stating his opinion on the topic, and it is not popular with others. How is that against the guidelines?

It was an obvious generic tangent into an obvious flamewar topic.

I realize that details like that can be activating, but in this case it was a clear swerve into offtopicness. This is not a borderline call!

Offtopic swerves can be fine when they're interesting and unpredictable, but classic flamewar swerves are the opposite of that.

It wasn't. He was simply stating what he saw and why that made him uncomfortable.

It wasn't even remotely off-topic. This is a RELEASE banner/promo website for the product. He discusses that.

It seems just like censorship, and that's cool. I understand the requirements to keep narratives flowing. But we'll all end up in an echo chamber, unable to admit when we feel like something feels wrong.

You keep using words like "flamewar" and "flamebait" for the topic of someone feeling that a race was purposefully neglected for marketing. It sounds like you're the one trying to smooth over a very validly concerned topic.

Edit: I realise you are now attempting to delete his comments because he replied to other comments that were clearly not very nice (in his edit). So I guess you're just torching the flames that he's already tried torching? But with force?

We don't care about "narratives" - we're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't destroy itself in the obvious internet ways, and the principles of how we try to do that are well-established. As I said, this wasn't a borderline call.

If you familiarize yourself with the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the moderation practices here (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang), you'll soon see that they're applied pretty consistently and don't favor any narrative nor any particular issue position. It's common for people to feel like the mods are biased against their view when they see a comment that they happen to agree with getting moderated (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but this is just a cognitive bias—a form of sample bias, in fact, because those cases always stand out more (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

The problem with changing the subject from the original topic (the new phone) to a generic flamewar topic (race grievances) is that the latter tend to quickly take over a thread and to quickly lower comment quality. In that respect, they are like flames—they spread quickly and consume everything—so "flamebait" and "flamewar" are good words for this.

> I realise you are now attempting to delete his comments

I haven't deleted anything. If you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28921996 being marked [flagged] and [dead], that's because users flagged it.

It's really easy to jump to conclusions about this kind of thing, which means it's best to hesitate and sift through what you've actually observed vs. what it seems-like-it-absolutely-must-be, because the latter is usually a misinterpretation. This applies to all the moderation practices here. For example, if you see a post getting moderated and conclude that we must be opposed to the views expressed in the post, that's a big non sequitur. We moderate posts with the opposite views just the same way, when they break the site guidelines.

You can disagree with the guidelines and/or refer to moderation as censorship if you like—people differ about such things. Nonetheless the HN guidelines are the rules by which this site operates (we're not trying to impose them anywhere else!) and, agree or disagree, users here need to abide by them.

This isn't race grievances though. It's marketing grievances... on a product that we're discussing.

I understand. I've seen several cases where you've moderated unfairly in order to maintain some form of status quo, where the quo is just an opinion that we all have to share.

Familiarised myself with the rules long ago, but it doesn't really matter since anything that someone might get upset at is suddenly hovered within there.

Of course it was race grievance. That was obvious and unmistakeable—as it also is in comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28925162 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28925097, btw.

Your statements about moderation are inaccurate in ways I think I just addressed.

Yes. None of those break the rules. I guess you can address whatever you want because at the end of the day (post), it's clear that you're not actually going to moderate appropriately and are just trying to generate an echo chamber.

That's cool though. It's your website, not ours. You're free to censor whatever you want.

My statements are accurate though. You won't be able to censor that out.

Edit: Since you seem to miss a lot of actual inappropriate material, I've flagged it for you. Hope you can learn from my experience.

Those comments obviously break the rules—they're pure flamebait. Please don't post like that to HN any more.

No. They do not and are not. But I'm not the decider of what gets falsely labelled as what.