[dang]

You said that we enforce the rules selectively and ought to be moderating uniformly. There are many reasons why it doesn't and can't work that way; the one I mentioned is that readers are in deep disagreement about what counts as uniform. Whose 'uniform' ought we to conform to?

Another reason is quantity. Most random walks you take through HN will be moderated non-uniformly because we can't come close to seeing all the posts. I realize it's tempting to conclude that moderators are failing and probably of bad character, but this rests on mistaken assumptions. We care about this at least as much as you do and work hard, sometimes almost to the point of burnout, to take care of the site. It's a mistake to conclude that we must think a comment is ok if it didn't get moderated. The likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it.

Since you're concerned about the worst comments on HN, why aren't you flagging them? That's a way you can actually help us do better. Emailing [e-mail] in egregious cases is also helpful, because then we're guaranteed to know about it.

Some of the comments in your list were flagkilled by users, some were penalized by moderators, and some we just didn't see. I agree with you about most of those cases, though not always with how you responded.

It's great if you want to defend others against unfair criticism, as long as you do it thoughtfully and respectfully. Your comments have been doing that sometimes, but other times you've been adding to the problem by breaking the guidelines yourself. Please stop doing that—it helps nothing, and you lose the high ground when you do it. You've been doing it in your replies to me here, in fact. Your argument becomes less convincing when you do the things you're complaining about.