I really do believe you have the best interests of the community in mind, but this chain of events is making it difficult. Using 'off topic' as an arbitrarily broad mechanism to remove high SnR content doesn't have the best optics, especially when a lot of the child discussion was pointing out seemingly inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of HN guidelines.

Again, help me out here. You're acting in good faith. Maybe a more clear and specific set of guidelines would help?

You're not going to tell me with a straight face that the highest upvoted comment on that submission and the origin of some healthy debate was 'off topic' when the top 3 comments of most front page submissions are far less related to TFA, are you?

We don't delete things outright on HN unless the author asks us to. The most we ever do is 'kill' a post, meaning it's still visible to anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile, and even that's rare. Beyond that, we'd never kill an entire subthread with dozens of replies. We might downweight it or we might auto-collapse it. That's all. By the way, if I had actually deleted that thread, you'd not have been able to find it via my profile. I'm not sure whether to be more hurt by your assuming I'm such an evil censor or such a bad programmer. (<-- that is an attempt at a joke)

It's routine HN moderation to downweight off-topic subthreads, especially when they're at the top of the page, and especially when they're indignant+offtopic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

What I'd personally be happy to see being discussed:

- abandoning downvoting of comments completely

- introducing a compensation mechanism for flagging of comments (debatable)

- displaying all flagged submissions in a separate page with a link in the header (like "new", "ask", etc.)