[dang]

You've crossed into personal attack. That's not ok here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully.

When our backgrounds are distant from each other, we need to connect across those distances, not become aggressive. There are two options: conversation or war. Here we want conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we had to ask you about this another time recently too. Would you please review the guidelines and use this site in the intended spirit? It's not always easy, but it's work everyone here needs to put in, if we are to prevent the commons from burning.

[pluma]

It's fine. I'm not going to engage you in an argument about whether policing tone is productive if you don't police content (or the effective politics you produce by what content you do police) but I'm mostly just annoyed that the HN blocklist extension stopped working for some reason.

HN seriously needs a way to hide (mute/block) specific users' comments rather than just relying on moderators or mob voting/flagging to decide what's "appropriate".

[dang]

I don't know what you mean by the HN blocklist extension, but it doesn't sound like a feature we have. Are you using a third-party extension?

> the effective politics you produce by what content you do police

People tend to overinterpret that. Politically, HN is pluralistic (all major positions are represented, as you'd expect in any large population sample), but it turns out that pluralism is experienced by each side as bias in favor of the other side.

This is mostly an artifact of HN being a non-siloed community site. Nearly every other place where people encounter political views on the internet has already been pre-filtered (by subreddits, follow lists, friend lists, etc.) That's what everyone's used to, so when they walk into a place that doesn't work that way, they quickly encounter a much higher frequency of opposing if not offensive viewpoints. This is painful; it feels a bit like getting smacked in the face. Because this painful experience doesn't come with any explanation, people reach for the handiest and in a way most comforting explanation—not, "oh, this is about what you'd expect from a statistical distribution", but rather "this place is a (SJW|alt-right) cesspool". Even if the distribution were more in your favor, you'd still feel this way, because we're so primed to notice the things we dislike and to weight them more strongly.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(I know you said you didn't want to engage about this, but it comes up so often that every now and then I feel like writing out my latest take on the topic.)