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Let me put it this way then: You're mixing the professional with the personal. Administering and moderating Hacker News is your job, that is correct. You also

Let me put it this way then: You're mixing the professional with the personal. Administering and moderating Hacker News is your job, that is correct. You also admitted that the rebuttal and moderation action this all stems from was driven by personal emotions (your liking Paul Graham). Your personal emotions have nothing to do with your professional job, the two are irrelevant to each other. It's this mixing of professional and personal that is the problem. Not performing your job consistently will draw criticism, but mixing the two will cause even more fundamental criticism as was the case here. Personally, I think the correct way of handling this would have been one of two ways: A) Engage in moderating the thread and refrain from acting personally. Or B) Engage in the thread personally and recuse yourself from the thread professionally, asking another moderator to do the work.

dang 2y ago
I don't believe the professional and the personal can be completely separated. People can't stop being human and what does "personal" mean, at bottom, but that? It's true that we shouldn't act on each other purely out of our own emotion but that's true personally too, not just professionally. If you try to exclude emotion from human activity, including internet moderation, it ends up running the show anyways, just more crudely and unconsciously. Better to consciously give it a place—hopefully an appropriate place. Questions like this have come up over the years and my sense (you may disagree of course) is that the community is happier with moderators who show feeling sometimes and can be related to personally. I could be wrong about that, but if so, it should have caused large problems long before now.
- Applejinx 2y ago
  I dunno, I've been personally corrected by you and I prefer that you in turn can be corrected and can show human opinion like anyone else. So I would say you're right about that, and I'm more likely to be comfortable being corrected in future as needs must. So, carry on I guess? :)

dang 2y ago

I don't believe the professional and the personal can be completely separated. People can't stop being human and what does "personal" mean, at bottom, but that? It's true that we shouldn't act on each other purely out of our own emotion but that's true personally too, not just professionally. If you try to exclude emotion from human activity, including internet moderation, it ends up running the show anyways, just more crudely and unconsciously. Better to consciously give it a place—hopefully an appropriate place. Questions like this have come up over the years and my sense (you may disagree of course) is that the community is happier with moderators who show feeling sometimes and can be related to personally. I could be wrong about that, but if so, it should have caused large problems long before now.

Applejinx 2y ago
I dunno, I've been personally corrected by you and I prefer that you in turn can be corrected and can show human opinion like anyone else. So I would say you're right about that, and I'm more likely to be comfortable being corrected in future as needs must. So, carry on I guess? :)