Just pointing out this (reality distortion) is a general phenomenon. Have seen the same in all big companies (& many small). As an employee you want the best for the company and you naturally imbibe the company culture and that is perfectly fine. But there is a line and this is something one has to watch out for as an employee. As an example, seeing any critical comment from outside as an attack on the company.

It is good that an employee explained how this particular event happened and that is to their credit.

I respectfully, and vehemently disagree. Informing someone that they may be drinking too much of their company's Kool-Aid, without knowing what is in it, is a moral obligation.

Despicable that you present this as a bannable offense.

Sorry, but garden-variety internet comments and cheap personal attacks don't rise to the noble level of moral obligation. The comment plainly broke the site guidelines. That's not allowed here. If people have noble moral duties to fulfill, they can fulfill them without breaking the rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I too don't think there is any "moral obligation" involved but I did feel it was perfectly fine to point out what I did. I quoted their "I work for MS" to provide the context for my comment, nothing more.

Sorry, but that's definitely not accurate. You quoted it as part of a personal attack: implying that someone was lying about making a mistake, imputing sinister motivations to them instead, and adding a name-calling putdown into the mix (accusing them of being inside a "reality distortion field", as if you know more about their world than they do). All that is clearly against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I'm sure you didn't intend it that way, but we have to go by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Intent doesn't communicate itself, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

You are insinuating astroturfing with no evidence other than "I work at Microsoft" and your personal, albeit somewhat justified, belief of "MS bad". It's not a constructive comment.

> garden-variety internet comments and cheap personal attacks

That is how you took the comment.

I took the comment to be a refreshing dose of reality.

Perspective matters a lot.

Ok, but anyone could say that about any comment, so from a moderation perspective that is either an empty point or means that we shouldn't moderate anything at all.

For practical purposes, someone has to make judgment calls about these things. The way we do that is that we have a set of guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and moderators who make calls about which accounts are breaking them. We try to be as even-handed as possible when we do that, but certainly no one is going to agree with every call we make. Nevertheless, someone has to do the job, and that includes banning accounts when people break the rules and aren't interested in modifying their behavior.

> we shouldn't moderate anything at all

Moderation is absolutely necessary. What bothers me is that we are 4 or 5 comments deep, and you still seem to not understand why I spoke up in the first place.

The comment you initially replied to did not come off as a personal attack at all to me, in fact, there was nothing personal about it. They took data that was shared with them and used their experience to spit out their own thoughts on the matter.

So, I am calling you out for being a bit too zealous with the power you wield. What you do with my perspective being shared with you is up to you, but you're doing a lot to not just ask yourself "Was I being too harsh?" ... Here you have a human telling you that yes, that was too harsh.

Calling out the bitter flavor of a corporation's kool-aid is not a personal attack on anyone. Period.

You (edit: I meant the original commenter) very much attacked the person ("you"). I'm sorry, but this was not a particularly borderline call. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for past similar examples.

If you (edit: I meant the original commenter) had just said it about the corporation, it would still not have been a high-quality HN comment, but I wouldn't have posted a moderation reply.

> You very much attacked the person

Sorry? I did not attack anyone. I am defending a comment by somebody else in which you presume they are personally attacking someone who has openly admitted they work for Microsoft.

You really are lost aren't you? Along with the irony of mentioning "high-quality" comments. Wow. What is the _level of quality_ when the commenter has lost track of the person with whom they are speaking...? In case you missed it, I'm talking about you.

I will re-iterate, because I'm patient. I am telling you that you were overzealous in moderating a harmless comment about Microsoft as a company. There is no personal attack in the comment, no matter how you choose to view it.

Feel free to understand the perspective of others before you blindly share more of yours. What a disgusting interpretation of "moderation." Censorship is a much better word to describe where you're headed.

You're right, of course: the comment I described as containing a personal attack was by bakul (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684540), not by you. Sorry for mixing that up! I've added edits to the GP to clarify.

The core moderation point there is unchanged.

> I took the comment to be a refreshing dose of reality.

This is how I meant it but I could have phrased it or presented it differently as this point got lost at least with the moderators and may be many more. Will try to be more careful in the future.

I appreciate your speaking up. And I also appreciate the moderators in trying to keep the discussion standards high. They have a tough job trying to decipher the intent of every commenter.