[civility]

I appreciate your reply, but I don't believe the vandalism and arson metaphor fits. There are just people you let get away with crap and ones you don't. His goal was to antagonize me while flying under the radar, and he succeeded. My goal was to antagonize him in retribution, and I failed.

So where are we now? I'll go back to reading the headlines instead of the comments because I'm not clever enough to keep people like that from getting under my skin, and he'll go on to piss off someone else the next chance that comes up.

Anyways, I regret snapping at you. Take care.

[dang]

> There are just people you let get away with crap and ones you don't.

It's really a comment-by-comment thing rather than a people thing. If you're seeing cases where we're failing to moderate a post that cries out for it, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We'd appreciate links, because we can't come close to seeing everything here. Or of course you can flag the comment (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). In egregious cases, emailing [e-mail] is best because then we're guaranteed to see it sooner.

> His goal was to antagonize me while flying under the radar

Really, are you sure? Can you point to the comment that demonstrates this? Because either I missed something obvious or you're reading perhaps a bit too much into what was posted. Intent is notoriously difficult to read accurately in these posts, as I'm sure you know.

[civility]

> Really, are you sure?

Pretty sure, and user adwn commented on it too. It's a pretty common pattern to not answer the question and then indicate it was a dumb question in the first place. Then he doubled down on the acceptable insults in the follow-on response.

I'm sure I'm oversensitive to crap like this, but I don't think I'm wrong to notice it.

I wonder if HN would ever add a feature to block/hide users others don't want to see, something per reader. I don't see a browser addon for it, and while I'm sure it could be done purely client-side, you might find stats about who is being blocked and how often interesting if it was done on the server. Heh, I'm sure I would end up on a few people's list, but it doesn't seem likely that we're all just going to get along anytime soon.

Anyways, thank you again for the polite reply.

[dang]

You're welcome! and likewise.

I feel like we probably shouldn't add a block/hide/killfile feature because it would be a step back into the siloed style of forum (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). That would feel easier in the short term but would perhaps be a retreat from the hard problem of building a community site that actually works. The thing about that task is that it's always deeply unsatisfying and frustrating. One can only fall short. Yet it seems like the right task to be working on. Perhaps in the end, as Bob Dylan put it, we win the war after losing every battle. Or perhaps it just falls back into the swamp. The ambition of HN has always been to maybe stave off doom a while longer (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), or as pg put it years ago, "make a conscious effort to resist decline" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html).