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I believe that post was a neutral reporting of the actual situation, or at least the user's perceived take on it, and not an attempt to introduce flamebait. It

I believe that post was a neutral reporting of the actual situation, or at least the user's perceived take on it, and not an attempt to introduce flamebait. It certainly isn't an unrelated controversy. The EU/UK disputes over vaccine development and manufacturing has been well covered in many forums: it even led to an abortive attempt to create a hard border in Northern Ireland by the Commisssion, an extraordinary geopolitical development! Relationships between the UK and EU have perhaps never been worse, and the AstraZeneca vaccine is a part of that. In addition the pro-EU/German press have been telling people for years that the UK will wither outside the EU and even that there would be medicine shortages in the UK. Now immediately after leaving, the UK is drastically ahead in its vaccination programme. Some European politicians reacted to the UK buying up the supplies in advance by spuriously claiming that the vaccine doesn't work. As a consequence there's now quite some shock in German society about this state of affairs. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/28/best-advertisement-brexit-european-press-gives-damning-verdict/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/28/best-advertiseme...

dang 6y ago
I think that's a fair point. Some of these judgment calls can go either way. One important thing, though, is that the amount of information in a comment makes a huge difference. Information (that is, new information that people haven't already heard many times) acts as flame retardant. If the GP comment had contained that, I wouldn't have posted a moderation reply. By contrast, when a comment brings up an inflammatory topic in a one-liner sort of way, it leaves a lot more scope for people to project their own interpretation onto the comment, and what drives such projections are often their own strong feelings about the divisive topic. You can see this in the flamewar direction the thread took here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229255. The main thing to consider in terms of comment quality is the expected value of its future subthread. Having more information in the root comment increases this. Low-information comments about inflammatory topics have low expected value. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- thu2111 6y ago
  Fair enough then.
detaro 6y ago
but all this has nothing to do with if people want the vaccine or not, if it is available.

dang 6y ago

I think that's a fair point. Some of these judgment calls can go either way. One important thing, though, is that the amount of information in a comment makes a huge difference. Information (that is, new information that people haven't already heard many times) acts as flame retardant. If the GP comment had contained that, I wouldn't have posted a moderation reply. By contrast, when a comment brings up an inflammatory topic in a one-liner sort of way, it leaves a lot more scope for people to project their own interpretation onto the comment, and what drives such projections are often their own strong feelings about the divisive topic. You can see this in the flamewar direction the thread took here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229255. The main thing to consider in terms of comment quality is the expected value of its future subthread. Having more information in the root comment increases this. Low-information comments about inflammatory topics have low expected value. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

thu2111 6y ago
Fair enough then.

detaro 6y ago

but all this has nothing to do with if people want the vaccine or not, if it is available.