[humanrebar]

For what it's worth, the Eich incident has been in the back of my mind reading these comments. I was surprised it wasn't coming up more in all the "et tu Mozilla?"

To be clear, moderating for trolling is fair, but past PR disasters are pretty on topic assuming they are earnest thoughts on the news.

[dang]

I don't quite agree, because as the HN guidelines have pointed out for years, classic flamewar topics rarely involve anything new to say. And boy is that one a classic.

[humanrebar]

Yes, I understood as much.

It's also useful for people to understand that longstanding disagreements are still there. People have been sharing their estimations of the Mozilla organization and for many people, that estimation took a huge hit with the Eich business.

If we're not willing to keep talking about controversial issues, even at the risk of flamewars, we just retrench in our old us vs them mentalities and bubbles. And that has proven to be bad in all sorts of ways in recent history.

Anyway, I thought it would be useful to register another opinion explicitly. I hope it is taken well.

[dang]

For sure and no problem! And I think you make some fine arguments. In cases like what we're discussing, though, we need to remember the focus of the site: intellectual curiosity. Knowing what HN is trying to be and what it is not trying to be is critical.

Keeping intellectual curiosity as the top priority has surprisingly strong consequences if you think about it. It means, for example, that any social benefits are side effects—welcome side effects, but not the purpose of the site.