“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

The fact that this story has been allowed to live on HN's front page for so long has really knocked my confidence in the forum and its moderators. I thought HN had taken an enlightened stance on avoiding juicy topics like this since they clearly lead to lots of useless speculation and uncritical thinking. They are a net drain on community health. This story does not belong on HN. I think I can say that even if it turned out to be entirely true. It's been shown over and over again that civilized discussion about high stakes political topics is impossible. For every hard fact that deserves attention, a thousand hypotheticals are thrown up with misplaced confidence. The instinct to want to believe what you wish were true is just too high. And being witness to it makes you stupider, whether or not you participate. None of the behaviors I've seen on display in this thread indicate that this story is any different.

I blame it on the lack of downvote buttons. (*for most users)

dang specifically disabled flagging on the article, so it can't go away via the normal "downvote" mechanism.

I agree with you a lot—let's say 80%—but there's a big difference between 80% and 100%, and experience has shown that it's impossible to operate the forum 100% this way.

In terms of how we handle the issue of political/divisive topics on HN, there are some pretty complete explanations here, if you (or anyone) are interested: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you read those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is and would be happy to take a crack at it. Here are a couple of good places to start:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 (April 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019)

People have a love/hate relationship with their favorite internet forums. If you (again, I don't mean you personally, I mean anyone here) aren't occasionally running into something you hate, then we're probably doing a bad job—we're either too predictable, or too narrow, or both. I think that follows from the core idea of this place, which is intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... It's quite amazing how many unexpected and interesting things follow from that principle, but maybe this isn't the moment to make that case.