[roysting]

I get that the guidelines are just about the most subjective black hole you could drive a quasar through, but what exactly is the offending aspect? Is it the “Epstein island 2.0”? I mean, who believes that these types of people will not be trying to rebuild that same kind of capacity in some other place by some other, albeit similar means?

If I were tasked to do it, the Albanian coast would be a top choice for me too; it has near perfect conditions for such an enterprise.

Don’t we discuss viruses, exploits, dark patterns, scammers and fraud when it comes to other things? Why would it be objectionable to call out the top civilization hackers and scammers and exploits? Everyone can talk about meaningless scams and exploits. Is there any bigger, worse exploit and hack than hacking a whole country and civilization and extracting trillions in sum?

[dang]

HN's guidelines are subjective in the sense that they involve interpretation and no two people (including tomhow and me) interpret them identically. But they're not arbitrary, in the sense that every moderation call is just a whim. Most aren't borderline calls, and the one here certainly wasn't.

In this case it's the use of denunciatory rhetoric that fries any element of curious conversation that the comment might have contained. The combination of snark and fulminatey pejoratives is the kind of internet discourse which, however popular, is destructive of what we're trying for on HN.

(Secondarily, there's also something about the combination of "His kind [...] alien [...] paraistic [...] depraved" which has overtones that I can understand why other commenters were objecting to. I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but such language does have history and the imprints of that history are still active.)

There's a phrase in your reply here which I think touches on the core and that's "calling out". Denunciatory rage and the shaming process are natural social responses to bad behavior. But it's really not what HN is for, and this isn't just a matter of taste because we can't have both forms of discourse at the same time.

Past explanations about this in case anyone is interested:

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

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

This is in no way to deny or defend bad behavior of course. It's just trying to preserve HN for its intended purpose, which is fragile and forever in danger of getting trampled by the much stronger default forces on the internet. We're simply trying to stave that off for as long as we can (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and since it's more or less a battle with entropy, it takes a lot of energy.