“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

All: Whether he is right or not or one likes him or not, Hersh reporting on this counts as significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), so I've turned off the flags on this submission.

If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidlelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We don't want political or nationalistic flamewar here, and any substantive point can be made without it.

What's with the question mark in the title? Hersh certainly doesn't frame this as a question.

Unless it's a miskey of some kind which sounds like the most plausible explanation.

Edit: I took out the question mark in response to anigbrowl making the point that it's confusing things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34714493.

Edit 2: I've replaced the question mark with quotation marks following a suggestion by bee_rider: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713987.

-- original comment: --

We sometimes add a question mark when a title makes a dramatic and divisive claim, because otherwise readers who read the title might think that HN (or its admins) are somehow endorsing the claim. We don't know what the truth is and are neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the claim.

Edit: I dug up a few other examples where we've done this:

This is the year of the RSS reader? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105572

Anthropology in Ruins? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34049130

The great Covid and smoking cover-up? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869176

The basic idea is that adding a question is a flame retardant because it tends to dampen the meta-comments about the story, e.g. complaints that the admins are taking a side or whatnot.

In this case it's not really working, because the question mark is also generating lots of meta-comments. But maybe fewer than we'd get without it.

Meta comment of my own: it's not only impossible to please everyone with moderation calls like this—it's seemingly impossible to please anyone. That's why it's really helpful to have a first principle to rely on—i.e. to know what you're optimizing for. It occasionally makes it possible to answer an otherwise hard question rather easily.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Huh, I would have said that a question mark is nowhere near enough.

Your stance seems to be that this unsourced conspiracy theory is a story worth discussing because, and only because, it is Seymor Hersh making the claim. Then make that clear in the title: "Seymor Hersh claims America took down Nord Stream", or something. It goes against the standard HN practice of stripping out any such attribution from the title, but it's also not standard practice for an article to only be worthy because of who wrote it.