"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
It isn't a good example. Damore wasn't "fired because of an offended woman". Regardless of what you think of Damore, that isn't close to accurate. We all need to be much more careful about facts than that.
Worse, that episode is a classic flamewar topic which ought not to be tossed into like a Molotov cocktail into some other inflammatory thread. The only effect will be to send the whole thing up in flames. This is the kind of thing that site guideline is written for.
> It isn't a good example. Damore wasn't "fired because of an offended woman". Regardless of what you think of Damore, that isn't close to accurate. We all need to be much more careful about facts than that.
I don't necessarily condone Damore's action (or Google's reaction, for that matter) but I'm incredulous that someone could suggest this is not accurate (well, except for the fact that it wasn't an individual woman). I'm interested to hear why you think this is inaccurate.
I also feel it's absurd to characterize it as flamebait. It's directly relevant to the question under discussion - why gender issues are making men feel uncomfortable in the workplace. That doesn't mean their discomfort is justified - maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But flagging these comments indicates you feel that noone is even *allowed to discuss it openly.
> well, except for the fact that it wasn't an individual woman
That's a big difference! As I said, we all need to take greater care about facts than that. Bringing in a classic flamewar topic, when it isn't strictly relevant, is like dropping a bomb in the thread. The site guidelines ask people particularly not to do that.
Generic flamewar topics are black holes that suck everything in, especially anything that drifts nearby. They need to be consciously resisted if we are not to rehearse the same flamewars over and over. Some people may want to do that, but it's off topic for Hacker News.
> It's directly relevant to the question under discussion
I don't agree. Perhaps it feels that way because "gender" plus "controversy", but the actual topic of this thread is distinct and remote from that. We need to make finer-grained, more precise distinctions, if we want to avoid a big fireball.
If you think the Damore discussion has been done to death, then fair enough, I can understand the moderation decision. As to whether it's irrelevant to the overall discussion, I can understand your viewpoint - the article was specifically about sexual harassment, not broader "gender sensitivity" issues.
I disagree, however, that it was a mischaracterization of, or irrelevant to, the specific comment I was responding to.
dang, did this thread get manually removed from Hacker News? It seems to have disappeared. If it was intentionally removed, I'm disappointed -- this seems like a really important discussion to have, regardless of how controversial it is.
It set off the flamewar detector. We sometimes turn that off when a discussion is substantive, rather than a flamewar. But in this case I have to agree with the software.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html