In the short term, making sure junk threads like this fall off the front page of the site (or to the bottoms of their threads) quickly is an important goal. That protects the site itself, by preventing it from collapsing in on itself due to pointless hostility. This is the problem the HN mods have been working on for the past year or so.
In the long term, figuring out how we can host relevant discussions about volatile partisan subjects is important, and I imagine something that will become a focus for moderation.
Not having completely solved the first problem, it's probably a bit wishful to hope that we can address the second one.
HN doesn't have to be all things to all topics. If we lose some stories in the service of repairing comity, I think that's a fine tradeoff in the short term.
I would disagree that those are two different problems -- "preventing [the site] from collapsing in on itself" and figuring out how to host relevant discussions are tied together more deeply than that. As an example, if heated discussions/topics are systemically removed from view, it makes HN more of an echo chamber, and it will attract more people who will make having volatile discussions more difficult in the future.
The systematic removal of volatile topics does make HN more of an echo chamber. I agree. And that's not a good thing.
But there are worse things than being an echo chamber, and preventing those worse outcomes takes priority.
The irony about the link you provided is that HN does literally all the things Dash says sites should do. Of course, the problem HN faces is much bigger than the problem Dash is contemplating.
I think that HN appears to do the things Dash suggests, but actually fails at a number of levels. Since dang took over he's been much better than previous moderation about responding specifically to people, but it's still done infrequently and haphazardly. What's actually necessary and implied by Dash is the continuous feedback loop between moderation and community, which explicitly excludes hellbanning, deading threads, and other forms of heavy-handed moderation without concomitant explanation of reasoning. This is, as you note, a very large problem and likely impossible to solve with a low level of staffing and any belief in the ability of automation to guide a community of individuals.
But there are worse things than being an echo chamber, and preventing those worse outcomes takes priority.
I would disagree on this, but I see where you're coming from. HN serves a lot of purposes to a lot of people.
Moderating high-emotion topics requires moderation heavy in both quantity and quality. If HN is not willing to commit resources to that -- and it takes quite a bit of resources -- then connecting hot-button topics to GND is the least-worst alternative.
In the short term, making sure junk threads like this fall off the front page of the site (or to the bottoms of their threads) quickly is an important goal. That protects the site itself, by preventing it from collapsing in on itself due to pointless hostility. This is the problem the HN mods have been working on for the past year or so.
In the long term, figuring out how we can host relevant discussions about volatile partisan subjects is important, and I imagine something that will become a focus for moderation.
Not having completely solved the first problem, it's probably a bit wishful to hope that we can address the second one.
HN doesn't have to be all things to all topics. If we lose some stories in the service of repairing comity, I think that's a fine tradeoff in the short term.