Most are just suggestions, not law. I stand by what I said. Being vindictive is not civilized. I didn't make personal attacks - I have no idea who downvoted me.

Personal attacks can be anonymous, so that's a red herring. And HN's guidelines may not be laws, but neither are they optional—we ban accounts that violate them repeatedly.

It's not hard to see what kind of discourse we're going for here. What's hard is to stick to it when you're feeling that someone is subpar. On the internet, human biases yield a strong tendency to feel that way about others, and we all need to be disciplined about counteracting it. If you can't or won't take up the task, you're not welcome to comment here.

That doesn't mean you have to abide by it perfectly. I can't, and doubt anyone can. It means that when we slip we need to recognize our error and correct it, not defensively dismiss the information.

Then do the right thing and solve the problem by removing downvote on comments - you will do this community a huge favor and you will simplify the UX as well. It has no purpose outside of emotional buildups. Upvotes give you enough for sorting purposes - it's been working well for Facebook and Twitter. For everything else, there's reddit!

Downvotes are imperfect but HN would be worse without them. However, I don't think that has anything to do with your breaking the rule about incivility. Being downvoted, even being downvoted unfairly, is no excuse. Please only post civil comments from now on.

I am sure that you cannot back with any credible evidence the assumption than downvoting comments makes HN a better place. You can add flagging and that will do better, but downvoting is unhealthy. The fixed -4 threshold is random and wrong as well. The loyalty to Paul Graham's original decisions is misunderstood loyalty and there are a lot of missed opportunities here, because of these repeated mistakes.

Going off on perennial questions of forum design is not a good way to deal with the issue here.

When people can't or won't be civil on HN, we ban their accounts. There's no exception for getting downvoted—on the contrary.

I'm curious, did you know you were taking to a moderator? (dang is on the HN staff: http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hack... )

I'm asking because I'm wondering if it should be made more obvious that he is when he is posting in his moderation role.

Yes, I know who he is. Although I had a much older account, which password I couldn't recover, because it's from the days when no email was necessary here, I frequent HN for years and that's why I care about this community as I spend a significant portion of my life in here.

We can sometimes help people regain old accounts with no email address in them. If you still want it, you're welcome to email us ([email protected]) with the username and we'll look into it.