My take is that it takes only a small percentage of people to be toxic, for the lack of a better term, for most of the conversation to be toxic. E.g. someone acts inappropriately, then a few people overreact (i.e. follow suit), then whoever isn't interested in thinking in baser terms altogether skips the conversation: ergo, the conversation is dominated by the outraged, divisive minority.

Have you read any thread here on IQ, or immigration, or outsourcing? You can find the most vile, bottom-of-the-barrel opinions there, and the mods don’t give a shit, yet here you have a comment calling out misrepresentation (at best) of facts about eugenics and suddenly dang feels the need to sweep in and tone-police that?

I don't think I have. In those other cases, do you think that dang is being biased towards certain causes, or that he failed to moderate for some more benign reason?

A good question.

The whole domain of interpersonal relations at scale is vastly understudied.

I think we’ve learned, in the last 50 years or so of online discussion, how magnetic flame wars are, and how easy they are to kindle. An assumption of bad faith leads to an accusation which leads to a heated response which leads to people taking sides. Humans love conflict.

Yet it derails topics, it leads to bad feelings, it brings out the worst in us. Better to stop it at the root. The guidelines are simple. Dang tends to ask nicely rather than ban people. Mostly it works.

I don’t see this as hypersensitivity. I mean, there are plenty of places online where you can insult people however you please and it flows like water. I, for one, enjoy a place that tries to be the opposite.

> Aren't we all adults here on this site who should be able to handle some pushback?

Sadly not. I'm tempted to say "most adults aren't adults", but the actual dynamics are more what dmos62 described.

Let's say most of us are adults most of the time, but that gap between "most" and "all" is, given a large-enough population, more than enough to ruin every thread if care isn't taken to avoid this.

Edit: one factor that often goes unappreciated is the size of the community. Small, cohesive communities can support more robust (or even aggressive) styles of interaction—especially when people have other things in common that unite them. In the past I've often compared this to rugby teams [1] that beat the crap out of each other and then go to the pub together; or literary or comedy communities where the art of insulting each other is part of the fun. These dynamics break down completely in a context like HN, where the group size is orders of magnitude larger and the bonds holding people together are super weak, if they exist at all.

It's not that those other styles of communication are bad or wrong—they're great! in contexts where they don't cause people to come to blows—but they're not good here, because the context can't support them. In the current context—the large, anonymous, public internet forum—the cost of keeping the community going is a certain blandness [2] of communication. I'm not fond of that either, but one can't wish these tradeoffs away.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

dang has expressed this well before although I can't find the post. Essentially, remember that you can go to any forum on the internet. Here at HN, there is a certain style of discussion and expectation of behavior. By maintaining it here, we actually have more diversity of opinion and expression on the internet as a whole. Parallels to miscegenation, ironically.

dang has admitted he doesn't always get it perfect, and you may not agree with his decisions, but I think we can all understand the principles behind them, and people may not know how fortunate and rare that is.