I kind of disagree with your central claim that this is going on. But that's my sociologist head rearing up. There is, of course, a "wider HN community", but th

I kind of disagree with your central claim that this is going on. But that's my sociologist head rearing up. There is, of course, a "wider HN community", but that's probably the community of people talking about the appropriate use of downvote as disagree, or whether we should have a blackband for so-and-so reason. Communities are defined by shared experience, values, and goals. The community in question here is much more of a javascript dev community, and we can see the culture clash between them and the java, c, python communities throughout all these left-pad threads. So, I maintain: this is an attempt at other-regulation, namely people who are by-and-large not active parts of the javascript dev community making fun of the punchbag-of-the-week. I'm just cautious any time someone frames an outright attack (and make no mistake, these are attacks) as "for your own good". It rarely is.