If by foul language you mean profanity, we don't care about that.

The GP comment was definitely a flamewar tangent: 'flamewar' because it's a classic political battle, and 'tangent' because it touches the original topic at one point and then veers away from it.

Tangents can be fine if they're unpredictable, but generic tangents are predictable and those are the worst sort of thread on HN. They're so predictable that they're the opposite of the curious conversation we want here.

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

I think in the future it might be better to say "This comment is not up to HN's editorial standards to produce curious conversation" rather than asserting that it is "flamebait tangent". Using such strong language is a type of flamebait in itself (and the number of comments criticizing the moderation of this thread should be evidence that others agree).

I take your point but I think it's more important to avoid bureaucratese.

The number of comments criticizing moderation in this thread is not because I used the word flamebait. I've used that word thousands of times on HN. Rather, it's a function of my screwing up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769925. That happens sometimes—usually when I mis-pre-assess people's feelings.

The GP comment is certainly not a top quality comment but there are many "positively disposed" comments of much worse "quality" that have not motivated a specific moderator response warning.

As for it being "flamebait", within this context anything that motivates this classical political battle will be a comment on the opposite side of a topic to one's own opinion. Moderation would need to be balanced in restricting such comments to effectively restrict "flamebait" - yet only comments on one side are being killed.

"Foul language" is a very rough measure. The parent's thought could have been communicated with less sarcasm ("Sad that ... ?") and bitterness ("doesn't deserve").

Edit: Further, some topics, no matter how carefully broached, are just a bad value proposition. They may have a bad ratio between their intrinsic value (importance, relevance, etc) and how likely they are to spawn a low-quality thread (and how low that quality is likely to be).

So OP was out of line by calling it "sad" but to call his opinions "flamewar tangents" is totally different?

Edit to match yours: If this convo is so fraught, Dang should delete the whole thread.

Both 'opinions' or 'facts' can easily be flamewar tangents - the form and context count for a lot. There's lots of moderator commentary on this.

Indeed - the implication that a statement merely containing anything factual or backed by evidence makes the whole thing uncriticizable ("but it's true") is maybe the most common fallacy made in defense of provocative statements.

"Delete the whole" is not how threads work on HN. The way that threads work on HN, assuming that they're on topic, is that people should post intellectually curious comments and avoid posting unsubstantive or predictable ones.

Thanks, by the way.