[dang]

I'm afraid your comments do come across as trolling, and repeatedly so. If you're serious about not coming across that way, two things you should do at a minimum are:

(1) not toss drive-by flamebait into the threads, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10382497 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10376183. Those are low-substance, high-provocation comments that are guaranteed to produce more of the same, only worse—exactly the opposite of what we want on HN.

(2) edit out every trace of snark like "But yes, evil Germans and their eugenics, carry on." That stuff is poison and adds fuel to the fire.

Beyond that: tone down your claims, substantiate them more, and stop using ideological buzzwords.

[minority-one]

Thank you, dang, I appreciate the concrete guidelines. I was actually thinking of emailing you over this.

I promise you I will try to behave as you have proposed here. I think those are fair guidelines. In fact I very much appreciate your laying them down clearly like that. If the "no negativity" policy were as well fleshed-out as you just did here I think it would be more helpful.

I will abide by your rules because I want to keep posting here. But if I abide by the rules and you still detach my threads as off-topic, then it will have been an unfair deal in my opinion.

I'd be curious to know, respectfully, if you chided the user to whom I was replying, since what they said can easily be construed as instigation:

> No, it's not. The Eugenic movement started the quest for the "better" brain nearly a century and a half ago, and we all know how that turned out...

"we all know how that turned out" DOT DOT DOT is instigation and we all know he's rubbing the Holocaust on everyone's faces without spelling it out. To me that is a foul silencing tactic and it needs to be called out on. That is what I attempted to do when I made my "carry on" remark, after having substantially and politely fleshed out the topic in that same reply.

So as you can see, from my end your enforcement sometimes looks biased.

EDIT: In fact I'd like clarification on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10381398

Their post amounts to nothing more than "Intelligence research is actually 150 years old and it ended with the Holocaust".

Now what do you call that? Isn't that snarky flamebait? It looks like it to me. Shouldn't that claim be toned down a little? Shouldn't it be substantiated a little more?

I want to respect you but for that you will have to uphold your vetting standards equally amongst all players.