All I can tell you is that I spend tons of time interacting with commenters, trying to help people understand that line (https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang). It looks like that has included multiple explanations to you over the years:
I've posted thousands of explanations like that. The reason is not just to persuade/explain to individual commenters, but also to give everybody else a sense of where the lines are.
My sense is that if someone really wants to grok the intended spirit and make a good faith attempt to follow HN's guidelines, it's not that hard to do. Sometimes, though, people take the more obstreperous approach of "I don't agree with your rules and I don't see why I should follow them" (<-- I'm not quoting anyone specifically and I'm not imputing this attitude to you). In those cases, arguing about where the lines are doesn't help, and ultimately we don't have much choice but to ban such accounts. Often they then say "you're just banning me because you don't like my views", but that rarely has anything to do with it.
Some of this is cultural, meaning some people have a greater distance to "travel" behaviorally in order to fit the culture here. That may not be fair but there's not much we can do about it; there is a culture here that we're trying to foster, and that's only possible if commenters abide by it.
Actually, the last two were about someone else's comments and the one before that was a misunderstanding ("you've made yourself a straw man" wasn't a "personal attack and name-calling", what I meant was "you've made a straw man out of my comments for yourself to attack"). Just don't want to look like serial offender :)
I have absolutely no argument with everything else you wrote.
However, the problem with the line begins when I see comments that seem to violate the rules and yet elicit no reaction from mods.
dang|2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32759008 (Sept 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932634 (Jan 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20456414 (July 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18991797 (Jan 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18984737 (Jan 2019)
I've posted thousands of explanations like that. The reason is not just to persuade/explain to individual commenters, but also to give everybody else a sense of where the lines are.
My sense is that if someone really wants to grok the intended spirit and make a good faith attempt to follow HN's guidelines, it's not that hard to do. Sometimes, though, people take the more obstreperous approach of "I don't agree with your rules and I don't see why I should follow them" (<-- I'm not quoting anyone specifically and I'm not imputing this attitude to you). In those cases, arguing about where the lines are doesn't help, and ultimately we don't have much choice but to ban such accounts. Often they then say "you're just banning me because you don't like my views", but that rarely has anything to do with it.
Some of this is cultural, meaning some people have a greater distance to "travel" behaviorally in order to fit the culture here. That may not be fair but there's not much we can do about it; there is a culture here that we're trying to foster, and that's only possible if commenters abide by it.
gdy|2 years ago
Actually, the last two were about someone else's comments and the one before that was a misunderstanding ("you've made yourself a straw man" wasn't a "personal attack and name-calling", what I meant was "you've made a straw man out of my comments for yourself to attack"). Just don't want to look like serial offender :)
I have absolutely no argument with everything else you wrote.
However, the problem with the line begins when I see comments that seem to violate the rules and yet elicit no reaction from mods.
Off the top of my head: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36270224 .
Or somewhat milder case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32901464 with the follow up below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32909607 (especially the last one).
gdy|2 years ago