I agree with Dan, and I wouldn't have commented had I not read this comment. It's easy to underestimate the happy-but-silent majority.

Dan was spot on when saying that this acidity compounds. It leads to a vicious circle of increasingly hostile comments unless someone decides to be the bigger person and break the chain. Having a neutral third party step in to play this role (i.e. a moderator) makes this chain-breaking far more likely and works to all of our benefit.

People are more likely to comment when they disagree, so that's not surprising. The votes show the opposite, though both votes and comments are mixed.

Moderators have to make these calls. From my perspective this is no different from what we've done thousands of times.

I don't see votes as useful signal on Hacker News: for example, during the course of some comments I make, the vote starts out as very negative (from people who skim the comment and think it's insulting) to very positive (from people who read it more carefully and realize it's insightful). So there is a temporal aspect to votes (I'm sure you know more about this than me).A

And often when I get votes, there's no signal whether it's due to tone, or content, or whether it's because I'm expressing something that is true, but makes people feel sad (seems to happen a lot, makes no sense to me).