[dang]

I'm talking about the kind of pushback that happens when we get something seriously wrong and a significant subset of the community gets riled up about it. In the links you've listed, the one example that comes close to that is the pushback against how I moderated the QE thread. In that case I realized I'd made a mistake, and made a bunch of changes. Backing down, acknowledging the mistake, and changing direction is the only thing that works in response to a genuine wave of community dissatisfaction.

I'm not talking about resentful responses from individual users—those are inevitable, if only because misunderstandings are inevitable on the internet, and they don't (necessarily) indicate community discontent. On the contrary, by and large the community downvotes and flags those comments. It's the admins who usually come along and unkill them later.

I'm sure it must be very annoying to be around here for 15 years only to see some random asshole get anointed the big boss of the place and start banning people left and right. But I'm a bit more interested in what people (including you) think I'm doing wrong than you seem to assume.

[JimmieMcnulty]

What annoys me is your continued refusal to acknowledge the unfair lack of recourse available for someone who disagrees with a decision you’ve made, and your flippant attitude around making those decisions when it comes to people you don’t seem to respect.

You’re hiding your behavior behind the mob mentality that punishes dissent, claiming that a shallow dismissal response is valid because the HN mob has attacked with downvotes, so violating your own policies is acceptable.

The fact that I was able to find so many examples in just the past week should concern you. It won’t, because it’s clear you don’t “count” those issues as legitimate, but it should and you should.

“I’m interested in what people think I’m doing wrong.” doesn’t mean you’re interested in improving, however. There are easy, concrete steps you could take; simple rewordings, a policy change or two, that would vastly improve how you interact with the “fringe” of HN.

[cutierust]

The very fact that a forum moderator is celebrated like a hero (who never says out loud that there is actually a team in existence), and a guy who called Microsoft dead as a genius next only to gos should tell you all you want to know about the average level of discourse here and quite frankly going against the flow is something I'll have to fault you with at this point since this place is pretty much conformation central.