It was probably downvoted because it was a reflexive flamewar style comment rather than a thoughtful, substantive one.

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Brevity does not need be dismissed as an immediate association or prelude to flame wars, nor does it reflect unsubstantive thinking. While I understand your desire to vanguard the guidelines, and aversion to the messy-nature of the ‘race debate’, dang, I disagree with your conclusion as applied in this case.

Assuming positive intent and being vulnerable enough to ask questions usually will do a lot more to mete out such flame wars than latching on to the first emotional misconstructions of the drafting of ideas.

I don't disagree that much with either you or solarkraft. Moderation is guesswork and not all of these guesses hit the target. FWIW, here is some explanation of the general approach we take.

Brevity is fine. The issue is the expected value of future subthreads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

We have to go by effects, not intent: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

When the topic is flamebait to begin with, the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

"When the topic is flamebait"

To be clear, which topic specifically are you alluding to because I think anyone with any cognizance on the issues of race and nationalism have a lot of overlapping features and a lot of cloudy, hard to define nuance, so can you please disambiguate in this instance?

I don't think I was thinking of a specific topic when I wrote that. The OP was about Trump and immigration, which is obviously an inflammatory and divisive topic. The arguments about racism, protests, police brutality are others. It's not hard to recognize these.

There's something to that, it's admittedly not hugely insightful. Is it "reflexive", "flamewar style"? I wouldn't classify it as such, since the option presented is an in my opinion a real possibility. It may be a bit harsh and inciting for a rational discussion however, so maybe vsareto's subtlety is more appropriate here.

Generally I'm happy this place is moderated strictly to keep the discussion civil. That there doesn't seem to be a will (there are no dead comments under mine, as far as I can see) to allow a direct discussion on american racism feels a little weird, but is over all understandable.

Racism in America and related offshoots of the George Floyd story (for example protests, police brutality) have surely been the most-discussed topics on HN in the last month. You're probably running into the paradox that every story, even the most well-represented, feels underrepresented on HN.

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

There are likewise concerted efforts to get white nationalist taking points on the front page and painted as reasonable in the related threads. You see new accounts and sub-500 accounts that congeal around them almost every time.