Part of me likes to believe that the mere fact that so many of us worry about this issue, wish to discuss how to prevent it, and so forth may end up being enough to keep it from happening.

I see so few comments here that deserve significant down voting, but the ones I come across that do have already been trashed to oblivion. Hell, I've had quite a few of mine own comments absolutely crucified and I feel no need to argue most of them. Comments aren't what I'm worried about, it's submissions.

Anyway, on the topic at hand: I agree that Zed did the morally right thing in the situation. Was it what I would have done? Probably not, but only because I don't much care for solving mysteries given almost no evidence or reason to believe something is actually wrong. As for reddit and "social news" sites in general, I stopped actually reading the comments long ago. I liken it to reading comments on Youtube; there is absolutely no redeeming value in it. HN, on the contrary, tends to have more value in the comments than the actual article some of the time. It's very surprising and may be the only thing keeping my rampant cynicism about "intelligence on the Internet" in check, as far as discussions are concerned.