When a single word starts sucking most of the thread's attention and leading to acrimonious nitpickery, it's an easy call to take that word out of the title.
In the present case, for example, it behooves us all to learn about the real situation that is actually happening, rather than arguing about whether or not it deserves the term 'rescue', a semantic dispute which seems correlated with people's priors on the most divisive associations (e.g. the Elonian Dimension) and is therefore mostly a proxy for a repetitive and tedious argument.
Thank you for explaining that! Seems a tough call doing that versus flagging the root comment of the acrimony, but maybe that alternate approach would have a bigger (too big) cost in disruption once there is such a small continent of comments built out under the top comment.
We can do that too, or at least mark the low-quality subthreads offtopic (which downranks them). But if we don't take the provocation out of the title, it'll only generate more of the same.
There's also your brilliant practice of collecting off-topic threads under a "sweep" comment, which strikes me as astoundingly effective at re-railing derailed discussions.
Yes. Often I add a comment (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but this time I didn't.
When a single word starts sucking most of the thread's attention and leading to acrimonious nitpickery, it's an easy call to take that word out of the title.
Striving for accurate and neutral titles is one of the best established principles of HN moderation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It has a big influence on discussion quality.
In the present case, for example, it behooves us all to learn about the real situation that is actually happening, rather than arguing about whether or not it deserves the term 'rescue', a semantic dispute which seems correlated with people's priors on the most divisive associations (e.g. the Elonian Dimension) and is therefore mostly a proxy for a repetitive and tedious argument.