It gets simpler if you understand the purpose of this site: to gratify intellectual curiosity. If there's no new information, curiosity can't get gratified. People bashing each other with political sticks is the ultimate in no-new-information. Nationalistic arguments doubly so. And a comment like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18627641 is a black hole of this kind of thing.
Here's another way to look at it: being right, such as when criticizing something evil or dumb, isn't enough. For a comment to be a good one here, it needs to lead to good conversation. A comment's value on HN is the sum of the expected values of the paths it leads to.
Here's another way to look at it: being right, such as when criticizing something evil or dumb, isn't enough. For a comment to be a good one here, it needs to lead to good conversation. A comment's value on HN is the sum of the expected values of the paths it leads to.