If mods categorically had the ability to make every user fully and equally understand the nuance and meaning of all of the rules then being a mod would probably be a much easier and rewarding job.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That is exactly the point that I made. This is a website where the pretty much the only hard and fast unambiguous rules are about style and decorum. It is not hard to draw a line from “it doesn’t matter what you say so long as you say it nicely enough” to “people are nicely saying terrible things on that website.”

I’ve seen the “You can post anything on hn if you phrase it right” joke in group chats for years now, so this thread isn’t surprising to me in the least.

I’m not really sure how you and I could disagree on this. You are the admin here, this has been the worst thread you’ve ever seen, and you say that changes that would prevent this would be impossible and in major conflict with the “spirit-of-the-law” culture here. It does not seem possible to simultaneously claim “this is not the culture here” and “we would have to sacrifice the culture here to prevent this”

The guideline in full (at least as it’s presented on the page)

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Is meant to be read: “Do not advocate for violence. (decorum). (decorum); (decorum). (decorum)” ?

I would be surprised to find out that I am the one user on this website to have read “be kind” in that context to be an ambiguous suggestion about conversation quality or whatever rather than a rule about what topics of discussion are flat-out banned.

Given that virtually every other platform that facilitates user interactions has clearly-delineated guidelines about what is and is not ok to post about, eschewing that in favor of “be kind” sort of gives the impression that such guidelines here are unnecessary because people will… conduct themselves here… with, for lack of a better word, decorum.

Seeing as kindness is left entirely up to each user to interpret and decorum is described in detail, it is unsurprising to me that this site gets a lot of polite or analytical-sounding reprehensible rhetoric.

It is like if you made a rule that everybody has to have a prominent horn section, walking bass line, and off-beat rhythms with a calypso influence and then wondered why your second rule of “don’t be rude“ didn’t stop everybody from playing ska.

There are like 20 rules for commenting on this site. Pretty much all of them are versions of “have decorum”, and none of them are “do not advocate for violence”. It is not just tolerated but encouraged to post insane stuff here so long as it sounds highbrow enough (eg the “most charitable interpretation” rule. It is against the rules to call out stuff like advocating for violence if it’s written like Niles Crane wrote it).

As far as I can tell this thread is not really exceptional in any way other than some of the ire is directed at somebody that used to work for YC.

Given that, it looks like your position on davesque’s posts is slanted. Your take is critical of those posts, which means your assessment is compromised, and as such should not be taken as valid.

> Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives. This seems like as good of a time as any to address a few things.

This kind of reads like “It is Ronan Farrow’s fault that some crazy person tried to burn my house down”.

Like this guy was going to go about his week, being normal and not making Molotov cocktails, but then he picked up a copy of The New Yorker and lost his mind

What?

I love the whole “they are making money if you ignore training costs” bit. It is always great to see somebody say something like “if you look at the amount of money that they’re spending it looks bad, but if you look away it looks pretty good” like it’s the money version of a solar eclipse

> I ignore the law every day when I jaywalk.

Means the exact same thing as “I intentionally break jaywalking laws every day”. They are equivalent sentences.

This is like a line from a Naked Gun movie. The only way that this sentence could be true linguistically is if the party doesn’t break the law that they’re ignoring (e.g. I could ignore the rule against perpetuities while drunk driving through a zoo)