> Is the flamewar tangent part of this the comment on capitalism or "Capitalized medicine"? Doesn't really seem flamie to me but obviously others disagree.
The problem is the generic ideological tangent. You can perhaps (maybe!) imagine a substantive article and thread on the economics of cures vs. treatments. But that would require different initial conditions—primarily an interesting, informative article that brought lots of relevant information. Relevant information is flame retardant.
The situation is different when the topic is "FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection" and the comment is swerving generically into "capitalized medicine". Generic tangents, especially when the impetus is snarky or unsubstantive, make threads reliable less interesting, and generic ideological tangents almost always turn into flamewars. The reason is that there's very little specific information to discuss—that's the meaning of "generic".
Off-topic tangents can be great when they're unpredictable and curious, but generic tangents are the opposite of that. They're more like getting sucked into the gravitational field of a much larger body, if not a black hole, that pulls all nearby topics toward itself and renders them all the same. Avoiding repetition is the biggest problem that a forum like HN—dedicated to curiosity—actually has, so it's a big deal: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
I hope this helps explain things a bit. There are lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... also, but you'll unfortunately—and ironically—have to wade through some generic repetition to find the interesting bits.
If you mean in this case, that may be, but it's certainly not true in the general case.
Moderation comments have multiple functions. If it were just about this specific case it wouldn't be worth spending so much time on it, but they're also opportunities to explain the principles of this site to readers who might not have encountered those principles yet.
For those who do already know this stuff, it's true that such comments are tedious. I'm sorry about that. If it helps at all, they're even more tedious to write than they are to read.
A comment that spawns a lengthy subthread of meta trying to parse out what the commenter actually meant, why precisely they are being downvoted, etc, is bad. As is the subthread of meta.
[just gonna stop commenting on this site]