Maybe pg should come back to this board, and make HN his primary venue. Does he really like getting backscatter from all the bots and botlike humans on xitter? He could still syndicate there.
Meanwhile, HN certainly could stand to use an opinionated benevolent dictator (or at least tone-setter), not mere "both sides" moderation (as heroic as it has been). With such an anchor we might be able to constructively discuss these problems without getting derailed by the handful of reactionary flamebaiters.
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It is unfortunately very true. For about 20 years I moderated a very large forum. We tried so hard to be even handed it was somewhat comical, and then one day I decided to just clean house. Things improved remarkably after that but there were always new people willing to see how far they could bend the rules. It's interesting how you get these new accounts on HN that immediately start lawyering with the rule book in hand. There is no way that that is organic.
Dan & Tom are so incredibly restrained, I'd be much more of a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later type because the longer such behavior goes on the more people will believe it is acceptable.
