Dan, go fuck yourself. By letting people get away with snarky condescending tones and banning people who call them out on it, you're encouraging shitty behavior. "Don't be snarky" is right up top in the comments section of the guidelines, but it's easier for you to chastise me because I called the snarky guy an asshole. That's just lazy on your part.
Aggressive comments aren't worse, they're just easier for you to recognize.
You're right that "Don't be snarky" is high up in the comment guidelines, but even before that comes "Be kind." Being unkind is worse than being snarky. I don't mean morally worse, but worse in the long-term effect it has on the forum. The guidelines aren't moral edicts, they're heuristics designed to prevent the system from burning out. Snark is bad, but aggression is worse: it leads to flamewar and eventually, as people keep upping the ante, to scorched earth. It's in that sense that what you did was worse than what you were reacting to. Snark is like vandalism—it eventually wrecks a neighborhood. But aggression is like arson, or gun battles in the streets.
We care as much as you do about snarky and condescending comments. I personally share your feeling of being even more averse to those than to the cruder abuses. But for a bunch of reasons, they're harder to moderate. Here's one: people's interpretations of what counts as snark or condescension vary widely. There is little community consensus around this, and moderation can never get too far ahead of the community view. We have to choose our battles wisely if we don't want to spark backlashes, protests, and off-topic distractions that render the cure worse than the disease.
I can't moderate based on my personal views. That's the reason why your advice wouldn't work. We couldn't moderate based on your personal views either. It isn't laziness—it's that you can't impose an individual interpretation set on the community as a whole. People assume we do, but that's only because they haven't learned about moderation the hard way. Moderation is extremely different from extrapolating one's likes and dislikes into site rules and then using power to enforce them.
Does that mean doing nothing about snarky and condescending comments? Hardly, and if you read my comment history (not that I recommend it), you'll find plenty of examples of asking people not to do that. But they're ad hoc and I try to be careful not to demand too big a leap from the reader.
The plan is, over time, to raise the bar for comments so that gradually the snark and shallow dismissals stand out more prominently as abusive, the way that "you're an asshole" comments do now. Then it will be possible for moderators to do more about them. But this needs to happen slowly— frog-boilingly slowly. If we push too hard, the community balks and moderation loses power. We can only do what the community will support. We can lead—but only a bit at a time. Even if https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252539 was trite and unhelpful, I guarantee you that the hivemind is not yet ready to support moderator intervention at that level. It needs to get more refined before that is possible. That's the long-term hope, but it will take years if not decades to get there.
I appreciate your reply, but I don't believe the vandalism and arson metaphor fits. There are just people you let get away with crap and ones you don't. His goal was to antagonize me while flying under the radar, and he succeeded. My goal was to antagonize him in retribution, and I failed.
So where are we now? I'll go back to reading the headlines instead of the comments because I'm not clever enough to keep people like that from getting under my skin, and he'll go on to piss off someone else the next chance that comes up.
> There are just people you let get away with crap and ones you don't.
It's really a comment-by-comment thing rather than a people thing. If you're seeing cases where we're failing to moderate a post that cries out for it, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We'd appreciate links, because we can't come close to seeing everything here. Or of course you can flag the comment (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). In egregious cases, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is best because then we're guaranteed to see it sooner.
> His goal was to antagonize me while flying under the radar
Really, are you sure? Can you point to the comment that demonstrates this? Because either I missed something obvious or you're reading perhaps a bit too much into what was posted. Intent is notoriously difficult to read accurately in these posts, as I'm sure you know.
Pretty sure, and user adwn commented on it too. It's a pretty common pattern to not answer the question and then indicate it was a dumb question in the first place. Then he doubled down on the acceptable insults in the follow-on response.
I'm sure I'm oversensitive to crap like this, but I don't think I'm wrong to notice it.
I wonder if HN would ever add a feature to block/hide users others don't want to see, something per reader. I don't see a browser addon for it, and while I'm sure it could be done purely client-side, you might find stats about who is being blocked and how often interesting if it was done on the server. Heh, I'm sure I would end up on a few people's list, but it doesn't seem likely that we're all just going to get along anytime soon.
I feel like we probably shouldn't add a block/hide/killfile feature because it would be a step back into the siloed style of forum (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). That would feel easier in the short term but would perhaps be a retreat from the hard problem of building a community site that actually works. The thing about that task is that it's always deeply unsatisfying and frustrating. One can only fall short. Yet it seems like the right task to be working on. Perhaps in the end, as Bob Dylan put it, we win the war after losing every battle. Or perhaps it just falls back into the swamp. The ambition of HN has always been to maybe stave off doom a while longer (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), or as pg put it years ago, "make a conscious effort to resist decline" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html).
Aggressive comments aren't worse, they're just easier for you to recognize.