The comment didn't respond to anything specific in the article. It just used it as a springboard to make a generic comment about a much more general topic. That's what I mean by generic tangent.
Generic tangents always make threads less interesting, because they take attention away from the specifics of what's new in an article and direct it instead to one of the large pre-existing topics that people tend to fixate on. I sometimes compare this to a spacecraft flying too close to a black hole and getting sucked in: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
It was flamebait in two ways: (1) Generic tangents on inflammatory topics are already flamebait; and (2) the comment makes a huge assumption (that the previous situation was "racism / sexism") and treats that as fact without substantiating it. Large unsubstantiated claims about inflammatory topics are also flamebait.
Many many other top-level comments are similarly non-specific to anything in the article and more or less generic springboards. But you didn't respond to them in the same way. shrug. That DEI policies were an form of racism/sexism is not an especially novel or heterodox opinion. Opinions aren't facts and can't be substantiated. And I think agnostics and even DEI promoters can correctly infer why detractors would perceive these policies to be racist/sexist in nature without elaborating in depth.
Generic tangents always make threads less interesting, because they take attention away from the specifics of what's new in an article and direct it instead to one of the large pre-existing topics that people tend to fixate on. I sometimes compare this to a spacecraft flying too close to a black hole and getting sucked in: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
It was flamebait in two ways: (1) Generic tangents on inflammatory topics are already flamebait; and (2) the comment makes a huge assumption (that the previous situation was "racism / sexism") and treats that as fact without substantiating it. Large unsubstantiated claims about inflammatory topics are also flamebait.