Such policies seem practical and neutral, but ultimately just create a new avenue for bullying minority viewpoints - eg writing off a plain-stated comment as "trolling" (implying dishonestly on the part of the author), rather than say "flamebait".
It's harmful to optimize for apparent signal/noise ratio at the expense of making it harder to differentiate signal from coherent groupthink noise.
For instance, the response of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11226101 is even more polarizing. Yes, the followup's flamey nature adds to the indictment of the original comment. But due to the upvotes I'm guessing that the viewpoint of the follow up, if it were making a non-argumentative top-level point, would be less likely to be flagged as "trolling". Because impartial rules are still ultimately enforced by people, who inherently have biases.
It would be great if all overly political comments could be eliminated [0], but I don't see how that's going to happen. So the tradeoff is either having low-quality irreconcilable flaming, or preventing such by marginalizing dissent and encouraging a groupthink that permeates discussion but can never be called out - the noise will still be present, just masquerading as signal. IMHO it would be better for violent disagreements to act as flypaper and be more easily ignored, ideally through technical features.
[0] I guess that would necessarily include all non-technical anti-surveillance articles/comments as well, due to the opposing viewpoint of pro-surveillance. I don't think it would be good for this community to neuter itself in the fight against surveillance, but here I am showing my own bias.
I have to admit I'm pretty tired of having to police my conversation here. I always try to be civil and this post is definitely on topic. Would it not be better to not allow contentious submissions in the first place?
I get plenty of upvotes (and downvotes) so obviously what I say is resonating with some of the population here.
Edit: To be clear I don't think you can talk about moral panics in gaming without mentioning the one that's currently happening.
Gamergate trolling (which is obviously what you posted) is not on topic in a discussion about the history of Dungeons and Dragons—nor, for that matter, anywhere on HN.
You've subtly changed the subject by saying "contentious submissions". That's not what this is about.
The guidelines hold independently of upvotes. HN is a constitutional democracy. If you're tired of following the guidelines, please stop posting here until your energy is recouped.
Please don't do it again.