If a person can't even deal with the vague threat of somebody "silencing" them, they're likely to be too scared of thinking to be worth talking to. They don't "

If a person can't even deal with the vague threat of somebody "silencing" them, they're likely to be too scared of thinking to be worth talking to. They don't "deserve to be silenced" any more than a spam email "deserves to be filtered out". They just... that's what the filter's for, to keep the recipient's email inbox readable. If I start posting on here about why you should buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X, and nothing else- whether it's "just a weird bit i'm doing" or not, I'm going to get banned. I'm not going to get banned for thinking the words "Buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X", though. Funny, that. (Well, hopefully! It'd suck to lose this account, though being off HN is probably a net positive in most ways!) And posting the text string "GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T ROLAX" is, to a human, obviously not spam, and is an obvious joke. To a spam filter, though, unthinking shitty rulesets and regexes? Yeah, bye. Human moderation "doesn't scale", though, right? You've gotta have some basic filtering and CAPTCHAs to at least catch low-effort spambots lest they make everything useless for everybody else. Unfortunately, this means that actual human posters do need to be able to identify a fire hydrant or traffic light. This is trivial generally... for people who know what fire hydrants and traffic lights are. (Is a hot dog a sandwich?). But if you don't know, ask a friend. That seems to work.