Then this goes back to some of the earlier discussions I've had with you in that there's clearly a deeper issue at hand with the community if the mention of race in a benign story incites flamewars.

Empirically it might reduce flame wars on HN, but you need to take a long hard consideration as to why it causes flame wars on HN and not other sites. Because to me, that signifies a certain, non-small proportion of the userbase here is unable to handle topics involving race, and that section of the userbase is so virulent that even stories which do not proselytize are wrapped up into the flame war.

And to preempt the argument I already see forming: Yes, social media sites and HN are a reflection of society. But your duty as someone maintaining the site is to control what parts and in what ways it reflects society. It is an excuse. Not an argument. And I find erasing race from discussions because it might inflame racists to be particularly egregious. I can understand doing so if the poster did so in a way as to misrepresent the article, but this was not the case.

"Empirically it might reduce flame wars on HN, but you need to take a long hard consideration as to why it causes flame wars on HN and not other sites."

This is so evidently false that I'm inclined to think it's even contrary to what you suggest; "other sites" is far too ambiguous.

I believe you're completely wrong about this not being the case on other sites. If you can find even one site that can fairly be compared to HN which is not at least as bad on divisive social issues, I'll be surprised. If I recall correctly, the last time you brought this up you said you were comparing HN to private, controlled forums. That's not a legitimate comparison. I'd bet that those private, controlled forums are far smaller as well. Any such community is going to have a completely different dynamic by virtue of size and structure alone. It's not because the moderators are more enlightened there or less enlightened here. That may well be the case but I guarantee you it's not the high-order bit.

Your argument about this feels to me a bit like backseat driving. All of HN's problems in these areas are endemic to the category it belongs to: a large, public, optionally anonymous, completely open internet forum. Find one of those we can learn to do better from, and I'll be delighted to.

Of course then this becomes an argument about scale, doesn't it? Twitter and Facebook both suffer from problems of racists and issues relating thereof, but do you really, really want HN to be compared to those sites? Do you view HN as having the same issues adapting to scale and being unable to control their userbase? Do you believe Facebook and Twitter to be above criticism because they have little to no other sites they can be compared to?

The sites I'm referring to are more or less microcosms. Larger subreddits, or sites like Tildes, SomethingAwful etc. These sites don't have the traffic of HN, but they deal with similar issues at their own scale. Larger sites can and absolutely should apply ideas learned at smaller scales and try to scale them upwards.

edit: Regardless of my thoughts on the site, I'll stop arguing about it and let things hopefully get back on topic.