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I'm a little bothered by the flagging of this comment. What guideline has he broken? He engaged with the parent comment, was not uncivil, and while the content

I'm a little bothered by the flagging of this comment. What guideline has he broken? He engaged with the parent comment, was not uncivil, and while the content of his post is surely contentious, the topic of this submission is inherently contentious. Are people not allowed to express the opinion that Communism is problematic on a discussion on the state of freedom in one of the few remaining communist countries? Should we just say "yay Cuba" and move on?

dang 8y ago
You certainly don't have to yay Cuba or yay communism, but the discussions people get into when topic becomes this generic and this divisive usually end up in flames. That's what we're trying to avoid here. Notice how it went straight to Saudi Arabia? That's a flamewar move, not a substantive one. And then we get https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17763463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17763463, and so on and so on. We moderate HN this way because the site has a clear mandate: thoughtful conversation on topics of intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). At this point we have over 10 years' experience with where the community's limits are in terms of what can be discussed that way versus what spills over into flames. When the needle starts to go into the red, that's when we moderate. I assume that the users who flagged that comment were doing much the same.