I appreciate your elaborate response, I'm going to try to elaborate on my thought process. In this thread they claimed that both Gemini and ChatGPT were banned

I appreciate your elaborate response, I'm going to try to elaborate on my thought process. In this thread they claimed that both Gemini and ChatGPT were banned by EU and used that as basis for expressing general anti-EU sentiments, but just a few days ago they were talking about life in Italy and how they use both Gemini and ChatGPT (one of them being paid, if I recall correctly). How could someone genuinely believe that these tools were banned if they were a paid user of them, in the EU no less? An an aside, I believe this comment had been edited, could you confirm? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882180 I used words such as "deliberate", "misinformation", and "troll" because they expressed obviously incompatible claims just days apart, and my opinion was strengthened after after they kept repeating the claim of an EU ban in the face of other people who chimed in to say that both of those services were in fact available in the EU. Regardless, I shouldn't have responded to them after my initial comment in this thread, but from my perspective, nothing really happened moderation-wise. I find it odd that you would later equate[1] their actions with my continued responses that steered clear of flame-bait insults and focused on the subject of this discussion. My tone was snarky but it largely developed after they had followed me across 3 threads and repeatedly spammed insults in my feed every few minutes (this triggered notifications, which didn't help in this case). I apologized, but then I received another reply which I just flagged and ignored because it resorted to insults again. Later in the day (>12h later) I was curious and checked to see if any action had been taken and it hadn't, which I took as a sign that it was tolerated. I then responded with what I think was a very neutral response to someone essentially calling me retarded again. My comment directly addressed most of the claims they had made in this thread because I considered it to be my final response to this topic but instead my comment was flagged in short order. I try to stick to the guidelines (as you've pointed out, I find myself overstepping in certain situations, but as a rule, I try not to), so I don't understand why I'm being scolded in this instance. (1) Was I not supposed to respond at all, or (2) is there something severely wrong with my response? In the case of (1) why wasn't their instigation acted on? I tried to do the right thing at first, or (2) why does my comment require swift moderation action when it's a comparatively mild and on-topic response to their insults? I don't believe that my actions rose to the same order of magnitude of rule-breaking as theirs, but if you believe that my actions have been ban-worthy on their own merit, then so be it, I'll take it. [1] You said otherwise, but you're equating them in practice by saying that you can't ban them without banning me too. I was also close to shadowbanned after your initial action, so it seems like the consequences were equal nonetheless.