[samatman]

You do a great job, dang. Frankly I'm baffled at how you do it, and I can see why this comment would upset you.

But all you can do is push the nastiness below a certain threshold of passive aggression. It's literally impossible to do more than that.

I've found it just a bit more unpleasant to post here with every few months which pass. Insults still get moderated and downvoted, sure, but bad-faith dismissals and pugnacious pedantry become incrementally more common, not to mention drive-by downvotes on neutral and factual posts which maybe signal some kind of tribal affiliation, no matter how weakly.

I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.

[dtx1]

> I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.

Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum. As long as people exist that are entertained by trolling, derailing or just in general making the internet a little worse every day you cannot win. Filtering content or accounts is a fools errand, filtering people allowed to comment and post on the other hand would trivially solve this, especially when their real reputation is on the line with every comment but then you don´t get the network effects that low effort account creation and pseudonymity give you.

[eitland]

> Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum.

Here is an important observation I think I've made over the years:

All else being equal, the HN model (full names voluntary, IRL connection voluntary i.e only username and password, long lived profiles encouraged) has been better for interesting civil discussions.

Why?

Full name policies only encourage this explosive mix:

- People who don't realize the foolishness of commenting publicly using their full name on a controversial case.

- People with fake but real-looking accounts.

- People who realize it is stupid but does it anyway sometimes because even newspaper comments sections deserve some adult voices.

Very many of the people you'd want to hear from are silent because they don't want your name mixed in with the regulars in the comments there.