You did an admirable job of responding to piles of comments that needed Consent 101.

(Civility isn't even the main problem here - so many of people's comments were superficially civil but callous and misinformed. HN needs empathy, compassion, willingness to listen. It's not impossible to shift culture - Metafilter has improved a lot, but doing that required human effort from its leaders and not just software.)

I am a happy member and longtime reader of MetaFilter but I wouldn't look to it as a positive example.

MetaFilter has several full-time moderators who, because they feel they need to be doing something, are stifling discussion and deleting a lot of threads. Many long-time, valuable members have left the site because of staff decisions.

Meanwhile, a group of noisy, low-value users are mostly allowed to bully others, mock people different than them and even write death threats from time to time.

MetaFilter prides itself on being a place that knows all about Consent™ etc. and maybe that is worth everything else, but it's not a place where people can get together and have a civil discussion.

I think a number of my comments were somewhat regrettable. I stand by most of them, but I could do better.