not to disagree with jacquesm, really, but this is my own opinion. what he calls 'heavy-handed' i call 'pretty close to perfect'. this site is over three years

not to disagree with jacquesm, really, but this is my own opinion. what he calls 'heavy-handed' i call 'pretty close to perfect'. this site is over three years old now. we have thousands of active users. can anybody name another site that's as old and/or as big that is as well-behaved as this? i certainly can't. if pg wasn't serious as a heart attack about curbing bad behavior, we would have been overrun by trolls long ago. as for the thread jacquesm cited that shouldn't have been killed. that was far too negative. it would have led to a thread-full of mean-spirited bitching and moaning. meta-discussion is almost never productive. it ends up being the same stuff over and over again. the news.yc way is to just observe for awhile, and see if you can come to your own conclusions. i agree it would be better if there was a page you could view to see what the current rules and thresholds are: this many points to downvote, this many points to flag, you can't currently do thing because of condition, and so on. but pg is changing stuff so rapidly that building such a page would be a big undertaking. people expect sites like this to behave fairly robotically, according to a fixed set of rules that rarely changes. news.yc doesn't work like that. it is closer to becoming a sentient being than any other program i've ever used (heh).