This is similar to what I consider to be one of the most important parts of the HN Guidelines: >Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of wha

This is similar to what I consider to be one of the most important parts of the HN Guidelines: >Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. I think it nicely and concisely encapsulates a few critical parts of online conversation: that it's a two-way street and to be productive requires responders to also really think about what is being said, and that we should all take a certain level of humility as a baseline because we lack a lot of the non-verbal cues that face to face discussion has. A big one (and a definitional part of the whole "global community" thing) is that it can be hard to tell on the Internet if someone is a native speaker or not. Particularly for English, since that gets a significant level of formal education through much of the world and is also a significant focus of machine translation with probably one of the larger learning sets due to being an early target. IRL people can quickly tell if there is some sort of language barrier and adjust accordingly, but in online discussions it can be a lot harder to not project too many expectations onto people on the other side of the screen. And of course even native speakers can just plain be tired, or have had a bad day, things which again non-verbal cues could suggest but takes conscious effort with just words. Finally, people outside of a specialization can have valuable ideas to convey but lack the terminology to express it the way someone specialized would. One could say they're not "native speakers" of that sub-dialect of English even if they're native English speakers. So it really helps as a baseline to try to figure out what people are really aiming for even if they lack the precise words to convey it. I've found it's a suggestion that has made me contemplate and rewrite responses even if I still forget sometimes. One fair corollary however: this is all as long as there is reason to assume good faith. That's the default assumption, but it's not a right either, it is in fact possible for someone to demonstrate bad faith. In that case suppression or expulsion should be swift despite any cries of "censorship", because resource exhaustion attacks are also a major threat in online discussion. Less so in more specialized areas like mailing lists then general forums, but even there it can happen via rules lawyering and the like.