It's not about tact it's about tone. You can advocate incredibly cruelty if you do it with bloodless prose in a detached voice. This isn't a novel observation o

It's not about tact it's about tone. You can advocate incredibly cruelty if you do it with bloodless prose in a detached voice. This isn't a novel observation on here. But I have seen dang himself attack someone for pointing this out, and said they were using a slur. That's definitely not a ban, it's not silencing either by itself. But it's a solid first step in that direction. And having moderated large groups myself I know you can effectively disallow certain positions by signaling to the rest of the community that you want them shut down. HN's actual moderation is significantly based on this sort of "soft power" approach, where you're rarely explicitly blocked from saying something and there's no official list of verboten ideas, but you'll get this sort of distributed denouncement. I don't know that this is actually worse than having a set list of disallowed positions or not. Different tradeoffs for sure and HN seems a lot more socially stable than most message boards over time. But on the other hand (iirc) it has a small and consistent set of mods, so it's hard to tell what's from policy and what's from their vocational aptitude.