You've posted many uncivil comments to HN. We've asked you more than once not do this. If you can't or won't stop, we will ban your account.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10798178 and marked it off-topic.

Huh, I can't see anything uncivil in the post you linked to. Copypasted the wrong one?

The comment I chided wasn't 10798178 (which indeed was fine), but an uncivil reply to it which its author subsequently deleted. The deletion is what made this confusing. You should see "[deleted]" just above my comment upthread—that's a stand-in for the post I was replying to.

Ah, now I get it. I thought the "deleted" was a result of detaching that post.

Isn't downvoting such an opinion enough? Do we pretend that banning will pacify people that want to stir trouble?

Empirically, no, it's nowhere near enough.

Also, sometimes such comments get upvoted.

For evidence look no further than any popular subreddit on reddit.

Then... they are right?

That's a misunderstanding of how HN works. Upvotes don't determine everything here, because the main value of the site—intellectual curiosity—would quickly be overwhelmed if they did. Drama, gossip, and outrage routinely drive more upvotes, even among groups of smart people. So HN is a constitutional democracy: mostly driven by upvotes, but with checks and balances to mitigate the bad effects. The HN guidelines are the constitution and moderation is one of the checks.

No, it simply means they are popular, which is not the same thing as "right".

If you can't trust the community's votes, perhaps the voting system should be viewed as a failed experiment. I'm not being facetious.

After all, if you look at HN's front page five or six years ago, and compare it to the front page today, you'll see that HN used to be a legitimately useful tool for entrepreneurs; whereas now it is primarily a source of frivolous distractions. There's almost nothing on this site that helps entrepreneurs.

I understand that YC gets some benefits from the move to lower common denominator content; but in the long run do you all really want to be associated with a site that destroys more value than it creates? Because that is where HN is now. The true entrepreneurial community is gone. The voting is now useless.

What are some examples of stories that help entrepreneurs but that don't appear on HN?