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.)
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.