> I love hating on moderation and I'm always ready to be critical of it, and of dang

That's an oddly positive attitude to hatred.

Sort of tongue in cheek, but the visible effects of moderation are awful in 90% of circumstances across the internet. Granted we don't see the benefit of the non-visible parts, but on reddit especially there are endless stories of communities being ruined by moderation, and moderation being used to force community behavior that suit the moderator's agendas.

There instances, like HN, where the platform isn't trying to be used for making money or pushing an agenda. Moderation on this tends to be good, but that set of circumstances is rare

It isn’t just a person who is gone.

Through complete coincidence of timing, her reign saw her become head of state for the entire post-war United Kingdom. Life was different back then, in a way that is more complex than being defined by the things we didn’t have. Entire continents were owned by London, fields were hand harvested by men in tweed with scythes, it was illegal to compete with the government telephone monopoly and/or be gay, and goods were hoisted off ships in cargo nets.

It’s hard enough to look back at the 1980s and see what a shockingly different country the UK was, let alone to the 60s and 50s. Elizabeth was present for the post war reconstruction of Europe, the emancipation of the working classes, and ironically the end of most people’s deference to anything except money or celebrity.

On top of all this she also represented a beloved family member to which many of us can relate, especially those of us who have lost that grandma, mother, or sister.

Her death is both a single flower dying, and the last flower of its species dying.

>On top of all this she also represented a beloved family member to which many of us can relate, especially those of us who have lost that grandma, mother, or sister.

She represents a bygone institution that will one day cease to exist, quite possibly the last monarch to die with the title in Australia and hopefully elsewhere.

>Her death is both a single flower dying, and the last flower of its species dying.

This is exactly what my previous comment was getting at. This is HN not poetry corner.

But hundreds of comments repeating the most boring things like "she will be missed" aren't better left for the I Love Being Ruled Over Facebook Group?

(That's pretty funny.)

This is the point I was trying to make at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769925 by quoting pg's 15-year-old bit about how empty positive comments aren't so bad (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). It's true that they don't contain any more information than empty negative comments, but they don't degrade the threads the way empty negative comments do.

Unfortunately people took that as some sort of pro-monarchist stance!

All advocates of temperance and moderation are preservers of the status quo. Therefore advocates of change naturally fall afoul of the moderators.

They certainly do when their advocacy takes the form of sneering.

Tone policing is a form of moderation.

Yes, of course it is.

Who decides what's "empty positive" vs "empty negative"? What you frame as pro-monarchist vs anti- can be as easily framed as anti-egalitarian vs pro-egalitarian. So anti-egalitarian empty comments were allowed, while pro-egalitarian ones were held to a higher standard.

"Empty" praises and supports for one side of the position - a political position in a complex issue, not just "Thanks" like PG writes - are not really empty, they're the tools of populist campaigns.

I will accept boring positivity over boring negativity any day, and as dang responded, that is basically his approach here too. I think boring comments in general should be dissuaded but frankly this post on HN was never going to generate much interesting convo anyway