Unfortunately, yes. This is not the first time I've seen this pattern play out here. Any popular article where the main subject is gender typically goes the sa

Unfortunately, yes. This is not the first time I've seen this pattern play out here. Any popular article where the main subject is gender typically goes the same way. If the mods are around, they can sometimes step in early enough to encourage good dialogue and nip the bad actors early on. But when that doesn't happen, these threads will usually be dominated early-on with bad content from ideologues, and end up even worse because those comments end up shaping the dialogue into a flame war. So many HN readers just flag the whole post when it's obvious that the comments have strayed too far outside of the HN guidelines for discourse. I don't do that myself or condone it, but it's not uncommon. Sometimes the article will end up being re-posted with greater mod oversight to prevent both agenda-flagging (when people really do flag on-topic articles to prevent others from seeing it) and to fix the problem caused by lousy comments where the good replies need to be de-coupled from low-effort parent comments. This thread clearly needs moderation for both of those issues, but it may not happen today.