I didn't even see that comment. We don't see everything that gets posted to HN (not even close) and often don't read the threads in linear order. If there's a comment that ought to be moderated but hasn't been, that's the likeliest explanation, and you can help by letting us know about it—by flagging it and/or (in egregious cases) emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

It isn't against the rules to be wrong. When someone else is wrong, and you know something, the thing to do is to respectfully show how they are wrong by sharing some of what you know. Then you can contribute to improving the threads instead of degrading them.

I wasn't responding to your point about how different countries treat the internet, though; I was responding to the fact that you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately. This, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265230. That's obviously not cool, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.

> Maybe it'll spur you on to do something about the other low quality comments that are flooding HN.

He's doing just that. You could have engaged the counterparty, you could have ignored it or you could have just downvoted it and moved on, instead you chose to lower the level purposefully, that is the problem that you perceive as 'the quality of HN comments has gone down dramatically'. If you let yourself be provoked into reducing it even further then you are part of the problem.

I don't know what "misinformation" means; people use that as a fraught pejorative these days. If you mean another comment was wrong, that's unsurprising; nearly everyone is wrong about nearly everything. As I said to drstewart, the thing to do in that case is to respectfully explain how another comment is wrong. Then we all learn something, and the person who is (by hypothesis) right doesn't make the mistake of discrediting the truth with extraneous attacks or insults (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

We can't have a rule against being wrong. That would combine several impossible things before breakfast, such as (1) making discussion impossible and (2) requiring us to have a truth meter (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), which we don't.

Your sentence "the community supports" doesn't work here because there is no singular community in this respect; there's just a statistical cloud of different users (including you!) who support a plethora of conflicting things.

>I don't know what "misinformation" means

Misinformation means false or inaccurate information.

>Your sentence "the community supports" doesn't work here because there is no singular community in this respect

If a comment is downvoted or flagged, it is not supported. If a comment is not downvoted or flagged, it is either supported or neutral (if it hasn’t been seen). If counterarguments to the comment are downvoted or flagged, that’s a solid signal that the original comment is supported (since it was seen) and the response was not supported.

There’s not enough time in the world to explain why every trivially posted comment is wrong. If I constantly posted comments to the effect of “there are no hospitals in Southeast Asia because it’s such a poor region”, how is that valuable? How does that help the community? Why should anyone bother to constantly correct me? And most importantly, if I’m a casual reader, I might take that as truth and that’s how misinformation spreads. I don’t mean “misinformation” in any political sense which is the trendy way to use it, but rather in a clickbait/flamebait sense that makes a populace dumber. Something that sounds plausible and since someone states it so authoritatively on a site that one might think has some credibility, so it must be true. It’s exhausting to constantly have to verify whether something is true because there’s no community punishment for intentionally saying something not true.

>We can't have a rule against being wrong.

You don’t need a rule against being wrong but you don’t need to shut down people that point it out. Nothing here except the original comment was flamebait. I know this because it was the only comment that triggered a cascade of negative comments.

Did you flag drstewart's comment explaining his point? I presume, because there's no vouch link. If so, why? If you didn't, why is that comment worthy of being flagged but not the original comment? Clearly the community has opinions on comments and misinformation is low on the totem pole of concerns. Hence "the community supports misinformation as long as it makes them feel good" -- it feels good to shit on countries you don't like and it feels good to shut down people that tried to go against the flow, all while the original comment that was wrong and incited this unsavory discussion is still standing.

I flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315771 because it broke the site guidelines*. The GP comment may have been wrong, but it didn't break the site guidelines. As we've just agreed, there isn't a rule against being wrong, nor can there be.

> there’s no community punishment for intentionally saying something not true

I've learned that this isn't a good way to think about internet comments, because it's virtually impossible to accurately read someone's intent. Not only that, but people are much too quick to assume ill intent, intentional deceit, or (favorite internet word) disingenuousness.

* It was dipping a toe into nationalistic flamebait, though, so maybe it would be more accurate to say it was straddling the edge.

I meant this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321408

That one is flaggable under your own version of HN's rules because it's completely wrong about HN's guidelines. It's also flaggable under the actual guidelines because it's mostly non-responsive fulmination.