I imagine it's a feeling of "I'm smart enough to rise above partisan politics" or "I'm smart enough to go against the status quo." In other words, people who believe they're smart enough to avoid getting manipulated, when in fact it's not a matter of smarts at all.
"Asking people for introspection" is a skewed way of describing your original comment. If that was your intention, you should go about it in some way that isn't guaranteed to start a flamewar. I don't think these "allergies" are in any way obscure.
Ditto for "very benign opinions". If that was your intention, you should not be breaking the site guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I realized that it might be helpful if I mentioned the other aspect of why I posted what I did. You have a long history of breaking the site guidelines. We've asked you many times to stop that. If this weren't a longstanding pattern I'd probably have reacted differently, but it is a longstanding pattern, so please fix it.
This paper goes into considerable detail about how the suppression of disputes actually fosters an increase in bad behavior by preventing community members from repelling raids by trolls. By not allowing anyone other than yourself to call out bullshit, you're soliciting more of it. You acknowledged above that this is an inflammatory topic but you are spending your efforts on restraining the very people pointing that out.
After a while it dawns on you (me) that whatever someone's inner state is when they post doesn't much matter anyhow—what matters are the observable effects that a post produces. Those are what we react to and base moderation on. When I say that a post was trollish I mean it had that sort of effect on the thread, intentionally or otherwise. I was hoping that linking to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... would make this point clear and that I could get away with just referring to it, but maybe not.
This is a narrow point since it's about the use of a particular word, but it's a word that gets a rise out of people (ironically, I suppose?) and tends to make them feel like they're being personally deemed a "troll", when the point is about posts, not persons. I mostly use the word "flamebait" as a way to just avoid the issue.
Re "prioritization of civility above all else", that's not my view at all and it's a misrepresentation of how we moderate HN. If you said "prioritization of intellectual curiosity above all else", we would actually have something to discuss. Maybe you disagree that that should be the goal? Maybe you think we do a shitty job of it, in this case or even in every case? All that is fine, but being argued with about something that we neither think about nor try to do feels weirdly disconnecting.
"Not allowing anyone other than yourself to call out bullshit" strikes me as a bizarre thing to say. Users do that on HN all the time, which is why the site survives. We ask them to do it while remaining within the site guidelines, which is not only possible but more effective.
That paper looks interesting!
In terms of "prioritization of intellectual curiosity above all else" then you are just opening the door to disingenuous bait posts, glib hyper-pedantry, sealioning, and various other trolling tactics. Of course HN exists for intellectual curiosity, but if that's the only mode of operation then it can be gamed, and it is.
Search on 'guidelines' in this thread and you can see people using the 'good faith assumption/strongest possible interpretation' guidelines to bait others. You're arguing that bullshit is called out on HN all the time, but you shut down people doing so in anything other than polite terms.
Regarding that paper, I urge you to pay particular attention to the comparison of successful vs. unsuccessful defensive strategies, and the fact that successful ones are correlated with higher use of anger words. Your antipathy to flames is what the posters of flamebait rely on to deploy more and more of it. Even if you kick accounts that regularly post flamebait, there's little cost to creating a new one and resuming the practice.
Much like forests, the occasional fire can significantly improve the quality of the overall environment. If you suppress fires so diligently that brush is allowed to build up, then the result can be catastrophic. In this metaphor, the brush is bad-faith discussion and wilfully fallacious arguments.
I think you need to be a bit more hands-off about this and accept that a certain amount of conflict and aggression in fact contribute to sustainability. While that might deter some obscure-but-interesting posts like the one today, the fact is that they will be just as interesting on their merits if posted in a week or two after the news-of-the-day focus has moved elsewhere.
The lesson in this case is not that a generic flamewar about Trump belongs at the top of the #1 thread on HN. If the argument is that I shouldn't have moderated that, I disagree and am pretty sure the community would disagree.
Rather, the lesson in this case is that, because the topic was attracting attention because Trump, this was the worst possible moment for HN to be discussing ultraviolet blood irradiation. A curious discussion was not possible. Thus I downweighted the submission off the front page at the same time as I moderated that flamewar.
I think your fire analogy is off. A better one would be fires in a city, and those don't promote quality. Quite the opposite.
I think your fire analogy is off. An occasional conflagration in a highly-populated city doesn't do anything to promote the quality of the environment. Quite the opposite.
Since I made an explicit analogy to a forest, rewriting it to be about something else kind of makes my point for me.
When? I don't remember that, and I just searched the email archive and didn't find it. I found a mention of 8chan, but not with examples, and certainly not with links to people organizing to target threads here—which is hardly something we would be disagreeing about. Obviously that's abusive.
I can't find anything about HN at your third link. The others don't seem to contain much, but I'll take another look tomorrow.
(p.s. HN's software autokilled your comment for what I hope are obvious reasons.)
To be honest, baiting people into discussing this quackery is the actual troll here and I'm genuinely interest why people take the bait. When the media does this, the simple explanation is that they're optimizing for ads. Great, that makes sense, but what's happening here? It's not like this is an astro-turf either, the discussion looks back-and-forth. Is asking people for introspection trolling?
When you call me a troll, you're not calling me a troll in the classical sense of someone posting crap to get a rise out of people. What you're trying to get at is something more subtle - the way a person has an allergy, this particular community has outsized reactions from otherwise very benign opinions, and that I should be aware of these allergies and know not to post them here. But these are not obvious allergies at all and very much at odds with a place that considers itself a place to satiate your intellectual curiosity.