We must be looking at this from different perspectives. From my perspective that sentence is ideological boilerplate, the sort that would appear in a political pamphlet. (That doesn't mean I disagree with it!) Because the audience here is extremely varied along many axes: ideological, geographical, you name it, that sort of rhetoric about a divisive topic is guaranteed to land as a provocation with certain sectors of the audience, and this is extremely likely to produce a flamewar. HN commenters are asked not to post comments that are extremely likely to produce flamewars. We all have that responsibility on a large, public, optionally anonymous internet forum dedicated to topics of intellectual curiosity (which is what HN is), because otherwise such a forum literally can't exist.

I still don't see it.

> A great showing

This part is subjective, so perhaps is the most problematic, but I don't think we normally react negatively to calling scientific achievements "great".

> for a small,

Factual.

> socialist

Factual (although I would have expected "communist").

> island nation

Factual.

> under decades of embargo

Factual.

> by hostile anti-communist

I think even pro-embargo folks would be ok with this description.

> forces.

Small problem here maybe?

As pvg pointed out, "facts" are a red herring here. You can make non-factual statements that aren't flamewar and you can make factual statements that are. Sticking to "facts" is actually one of the favorite tricks of trolls (I'm not saying anyone was trolling in this case—it's just an instructive example) because then when you say "please don't troll" they can say "what part of my perfectly factual statement do you have a problem with". https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The problem with the flamebait sentence I was objecting to was twofold: (1) it was political rhetoric of precisely the kind you would read in a political publication or hear in a political broadcast, and (2) it took the thread on a generic ideological tangent, that is it replaced the topic of Cuban work on covid vaccines with a much larger, more general, and more inflammatory one. Yes, it's related; the word "tangent" implies that; but that's not enough. It reliably leads to much worse discussion, and predictably did so in this case. I've been trying to explain this to HN for many years:

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

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

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

There's nothing different about the moderation practice in this case—it was utterly routine. But two things were different: (a) I wrote more hastily than I usually do and didn't calibrate my language very well; and (b) something about the specific question of Cuba appears to land differently with HN's internationally distributed community than most subjects do.

The items I labelled "Factual" are things like "island" or "small" -- I was very careful about highlighting the possibly controversial parts of that sentence.

However, the funny thing is that there was no ideological flame war in response to the comment. Why? Because there was nothing there that anyone even disagrees with or find inflammatory.

In fact, the only reactions have been to your (in my opinion) overreaction.

> there was no ideological flame war in response to the comment

To which comment? If you mean the original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27654110), that's quite wrong. The flamewar reactions were why I replied in the first place. Some of them are dead and/or collapsed now.

It's trivial to write a flame-generating comment made entirely of facts, 'factual' isn't quite the defense against this you might think it is.

I am very pleased by the way you moderate discussions on HN in general, but I really think you are very wrong on this. It is pretty clear that you are only thinking about the US perspective on things.

I'm not doing anything different from what I do every day! Come to think of it, that would even be rather hard, after so much practice.

I sense that some people may be taking my comments as if they are expressing a perspective on the topic of Cuba. I'm not. My comments are strictly limited to internet forum dynamics, since that's what it's my job to deal with.

I assure you I'm not thinking from "the US perspective on things", but very much internationally. I believe this is a case of people in different parts of the world not understanding each other, and underestimating how differently the same statement can land elsewhere. (I wrote about that here, if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.) Of course it's easy to take the position, "The fault lies with the others; my perspective is the valid one," but the problem with that is that it's a recipe for flamewar at scale. That isn't in any of our interests because it destroys the capacity of this place to remain interesting.

People don't need to change their views in order to take this into account, but they do need to adjust to the presence of other people. Across the kind of differences that we're dealing with in a large international community like this, that is not easy.