> Your comments in this thread were doing ideological battle on a classic flamewar battlefront. You even used the word "fighting" to describe what you were doin

> Your comments in this thread were doing ideological battle on a classic flamewar battlefront. You even used the word "fighting" to describe what you were doing. Surely you can understand how lines like ""wokeists" have caused so much damage to this country" and "The community you love has done damage to [...] society" are flamebait? No, not really. I was answering certain accusations with my opposing opinions. Unfortunately, I can't understand where a person is coming from if I don't understand their definitions of certain terms, and I can't understand your definitions of flamewar and flamebait. > If you get into back-and-forths with an opposing user around that kind of thing, you're perpetuating flamewar. This is clearly not curious conversation. I guess I misunderstand the purpose of HN because this line of yours makes it seem (to me) like I cannot debate political things at all, or rather, certain topics (does "around that kind of thing" means political things?), but that doesn't seem right either. > However, there are many ways to lower the expected value of a thread, and flamebait/flamewar is just one of them. That's why I think putting the lowering of the expected value of a thread into the guidelines is the right choice: it covers more situations. > I think it's important to be specific. I have shut off the discussion you didn't like, but it would be helpful to me if you were more specific about what you see as flamebait and flamewar. If I understand what you want me to not do, I'll avoid it, but I can't avoid something I'm unclear on. I also don't like self-censoring more than necessary (that is what the posted article was about, after all). However, I expect that you're busy and won't be able to answer me, so extra self-censoring might be what I have to do. It makes me sad, though; I felt like HN was one place where I didn't have to do that, and now, it does not. Edit: one thing that I could consider is trying to not answer every accusation that I'm a terrible person. Ten years ago, my Christian faith would not be attacked so openly. Now, people consider me a terrible person for believing those same things, and I find myself defending my faith a lot, albeit indirectly. I will try to do that less on HN at least. Would that be what you are doing of me?