[dang]

> What are you talking about?

Please edit out swipes like this from your HN comments—this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It comes across as aggressive, and we want curious conversation here.

Your comment would be fine without that bit.

[sigmoid10]

This is not meant as snide, I'm literally confused if I might have misunderstood the problem here. Because the solution would be so obvious.

[dang]

I believe you! but when an internet reply leads with "what are you talking about?", it's likely to pattern-match this way for many readers. If that's not your intent, it's best to use an alternate wording.

[vasco]

Not to be rude, but they clarified it's not a snide, why are you trying to control speech to this degree? If we don't like his tone we can downvote him as well anyway and self regulate.

[dang]

They clarified that their intention was good, but intent doesn't communicate itself—it needs to be disambiguated [1]. What matters in terms of moderation is not intent, but effects, i.e. effects on the system in the general case [2].

Arguably your question reduces to: why does HN have moderators at all? The answer to that is that unfortunately, the system of community + software doesn't function well on its own over time—it falls into failure modes and humans (i.e. mods) are needed to jig it out of those [3]. I say "unfortunately" because, of course, it would be so much better if this weren't needed.

You can't assess this at the level of an individual interaction, though, because it's scoped at the whole-system level. That is, we can (and do) make bad individual calls, but what's important is how the overall system functions. If you see the mods making a mistake, you're welcome to point it out (and HN users are not shy about doing so!), and we're happy to correct it. But it doesn't follow that you don't need moderators for the system to work, or even survive.

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

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

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