The vouch button appears for me. Interesting. I might understand this now. To discourage retaliation (I think) both downvoting and flagging are not allowed f

The vouch button appears for me. Interesting. I might understand this now. To discourage retaliation (I think) both downvoting and flagging are not allowed for direct responses to one's own stories and comments. Since "vouch" was added late, it reuses the same logic, even though the "retaliatory vouching" is not really a danger. I didn't flag it, but it contains some deliberately provocative phrasing from someone who's previously had user flags (and a ban) for their posting style. In the context of discussing perceived bias in moderation, I didn't find that particular comment to deliberately provocative. While context is important for interpretation, I think flagging (like vouching) should be done comment-by-comment rather than based on previous actions under a different account. Killing comments based on historic behavior makes "recovery from mistakes" more difficult, whether the mistake is on the part of the moderator or the poster. It's also not clear to me exactly why the FD3SA account (should we consider this the same user for purposes of flagging?) was banned. He ('james-watson') believes it was because the content of the posts and not the style. I doubted this, and suspect he was banned due to his expressed intention "to return hostility in kind". While bans on this basis may be good policy, if this is true 'james-watson' would have a reasonable argument that this is punishment is indeed for thoughtcrime. As one of the targets, you are of course entitled to have your own interpretation. For one thing that post doesn't appear to have been killed, and if it had been killed it probably would have been user flags, not mods, that did the killing. I agree, and made the same point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12315815. While this might be a good reason to downvote or rebut, I don't think that flagging is an appropriate response to factual inaccuracy.