zlacker

Your comment consisted of nothing other than calling someone full of shit. (Doing it euphemistically doesn't change this.) That's obviously against the site guidelines and correctly flagged. Then you made sinister insinuations as if the flags weren't an obvious consequence of what you'd posted.

Please read the site guidelines and don't post anything like that to HN again - you actually already did it again downthread ("Smell the air: smells like smoke - and something else"). Flouting the rules like that, after we specifically asked you to stop, will get you banned here.

Pointing the finger at someone else isn't a very tasteful way to respond about your own behavior, but as it happens, I don't see how the other comment broke the guidelines. The commenter may be 100% wrong, but there's no rule against being wrong on HN. If someone else is wrong and you know the truth, the thing to do is patiently and respectfully provide correct information and better arguments. Name-calling is definitely not ok, and please stop posting in the flamewar style. It's the opposite of what we want here.

What we want is described well in this sentence pg wrote years ago: Comments should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.

>>dang+(OP)
First "egregious violations" and now "sinister insinuations"... You are a trip. Literally that guy and you downvoted me, it's doubtful anyone else even saw the thread.

And I stand by those "sinister insinuations", for the record. There is no way, none, that multiple commenters found this old dead thread, moved to the second page, and flagged my comment within minutes of its posting. Occam's razor would suggest that OP has the power to flag people single handed.

I notice that you say "we" asked you. Is this the 'royal' we? Are there multiple people behind this account?

Dang, feel free to take this the wrong way, but I think you could use a perspective check. I've heard that acting as a gatekeeper too long can inflate one's ego. Ask yourself if you're doing as much good here as you used to.

While we're chatting all friendly; do you ever wonder what the real life consequences of removing that story about Gina Haspel all those times are? I think about it a lot. I wonder if you give even a tiny little shit about helping cover for such a ghoul. My nightmare is that you rationalised that ghastly act so well, you don't even remember doing it.

Don't take that as pointing the finger to deflect from my own horrific actions, lol. I genuinely wonder how you live with doing that all the time, and now seems a good time to ask you - you must have a great view up there on that moral high ground.

>>mandma+K9
By "sinister insinuations" I just mean that you're imagining manipulations that didn't actually happen. The flags on your comment were perfectly ordinary, from quite a few legit HN users, none of whom (other than me) have been posting in this thread. Similarly, "that guy" did not downvote you, other users did; and plenty of users have seen this thread—HN has a lot of readers. Whatever concept of HN you have that suggests these things couldn't happen, it must be false, since they did happen.

Half a million stories get submitted to HN every year. Plenty get moderated in some way; plenty are in some way ghoulish. I'm afraid I don't remember them all; I hardly remember any of them. It feels like you may be putting too much weight on one data point, if you're asking "how you live with doing that" about a specific story from years ago. The answer is that the moderation principles here are clear and we try our hardest to apply them even-handedly.

Incidentally, you can't derive any political agreement or disagreement from the way we moderate HN - we moderate stories and comments all the time that we personally agree with and/or consider important. If you scroll back through moderation comments on HN you'll find that commenters from every political and ideological angle get moderated, because people on all sides break the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I'm not claiming that we have no bias, but certainly we work hard at this and have a lot of practice at it.

If you would please start doing a better job of adhering to those guidelines now, I'd appreciate it.

>>dang+Tb
You know, if not adhering to your interpretation of the guidelines results in rate-limiting and threats to ban, then they're not actually guidelines, they are rules. It would be nice if you were honest about that.

And no, there is absolutely no way that my second comment was flagged by multiple users within minutes. This thread was long dead by then, and this is on the second page. What you say about the first comment is highly doubtful too, considering it was flagged within one single minute, with one single downvote - and was already also on the second page.

If repeatedly removing the story of an infamous torturer who destroyed congressional evidence taking one of the most powerful technical positions in the country - against loud and polite protestations - is really not remembered by you then you have two big problems. 1, your humanity, and 2, you need more moderators here because clearly you are being stretched too thin. Ask PG for a bit more budget, for the sake of your soul and the people here creating this content.