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Hi dang, sorry, starting off with "What rubbish <username>" was a clear violation of a very reasonable guideline; I've edited my message to remove that. Could

Hi dang, sorry, starting off with "What rubbish <username>" was a clear violation of a very reasonable guideline; I've edited my message to remove that. Could you tell me if I violated any of the other guidelines / what else I have done that is likely to lower the quality of discussion? Not sure if this is one that I might have violated here, but I don't think I agree with the guideline saying not to use HN for "ideological battle". That seems to need a clear definition of what "ideology" is, and even then it seems to risk ruling out many important contributions to HN, so I cannot promise to uphold that guideline unless it can be clarified, and possibly not even then.

dang 6y ago
The comment you edited is probably ok except for "taken in by people giving them saccharine messages", but I would say that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23563745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23563745 breaks the site guidelines about calling names, shallow dismissals, and generic tangents. You can't give precise definitions to any of the terms in the guidelines and it would be a huge mistake to try. All that an attempted formalization would do is create loopholes to be exploited, and then make moderation harder because people would excuse themselves with "it's technically not against the rules". The rules aren't technical. HN is a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20spirit%20letter&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Here's a version of this point from 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 In practice there is an easily observable difference between how people use the site for curious conversation and how they use it for political/ideological battle. The former goes with openness, respect, and exchange of information. The latter goes with being aggressive and wanting to defeat, not hear, the other side. The former produces comments that are unpredictable and fresh; the latter produces comments that are repetitive and nasty.

dang 6y ago

The comment you edited is probably ok except for "taken in by people giving them saccharine messages", but I would say that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23563745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23563745 breaks the site guidelines about calling names, shallow dismissals, and generic tangents. You can't give precise definitions to any of the terms in the guidelines and it would be a huge mistake to try. All that an attempted formalization would do is create loopholes to be exploited, and then make moderation harder because people would excuse themselves with "it's technically not against the rules". The rules aren't technical. HN is a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20spirit%20letter&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Here's a version of this point from 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 In practice there is an easily observable difference between how people use the site for curious conversation and how they use it for political/ideological battle. The former goes with openness, respect, and exchange of information. The latter goes with being aggressive and wanting to defeat, not hear, the other side. The former produces comments that are unpredictable and fresh; the latter produces comments that are repetitive and nasty.