All advocates of temperance and moderation are preservers of the status quo. Therefore advocates of change naturally fall afoul of the moderators.
They certainly do when their advocacy takes the form of sneering.
Tone policing is a form of moderation.
Yes, of course it is.
Re:Queen Elizabeth II has died
by nojonestownpls on Friday September 09, 2022 @09:29AM
(#32778958)
Who decides what's "empty positive" vs "empty negative"? What you frame as pro-monarchist vs anti- can be as easily framed as anti-egalitarian vs pro-egalitarian. So anti-egalitarian empty comments were allowed, while pro-egalitarian ones were held to a higher standard.
"Empty" praises and supports for one side of the position - a political position in a complex issue, not just "Thanks" like PG writes - are not really empty, they're the tools of populist campaigns.
This is the point I was trying to make at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769925 by quoting pg's 15-year-old bit about how empty positive comments aren't so bad (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). It's true that they don't contain any more information than empty negative comments, but they don't degrade the threads the way empty negative comments do.
Unfortunately people took that as some sort of pro-monarchist stance!