Hurling epithets at other users is. It's not like this is hard to understand. You can't argue this way on this site regardless of how right your views are.
I might have been wrong, but it's neither hard to understand the double standards HN/SV and the general consensus of left have. It's so bad that a guy who has thought of himself as liberal (or whatever you Americans like to call it), is happy to be called an old Fox News Russian Agent conservative racist homophobe idiot uneducated, because all these words have lost the meaning.
You can see from my profile I've been a good long-standing citizen of HN. Instead of banning me, maybe you should have banned the parent for hate speech. But you lack the balls for it.
It's pretty clear by now -- anyone can be as misogynist or as racist as he wants to be around here, or spew fake news and conspiracy theories with Putinesque proficiency. But one hint of calling a spade a spade and dang waves the banhammer in your face.
YC may disguise themselves in the clothes of progress occasionally, but fundamentally, they worship the dollar above all else, just like any other banker.
That's not true. What's true is that we try hard to be even-handed. That means that when you post abusively, you're subject to the rules the same as other people are, regardless of the politics you're posting for or against. I'd never claim that we do that perfectly or are unbiased—we're human, so that can't be true—but we work hard at it and are fine with admitting mistakes and correcting them.
I don't see a mistake here though. You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle, posting uncvilly, and abusing the site in other ways. Asking you to stop is not a political call, nor a hard one. It would be the same if your views were the opposite.
The world is political and ideological battle. Ideas will win and ideas will lose. People will win elections and people will lose elections. Technology shapes society, and who technology deems the winners and losers is political, both in the concern of tech-as-a-business and tech-as-a-product, as much as you try to pretend you're above it.
When you say you try to be "even-handed", what you are enforcing is "all points of view carry equal weight, regardless of concerns of ethics or truth". That YC can say "Fake news is a serious problem we would like to solve" while at the same time saying "We value civility over truth" is a political statement, and a damaging one.
Yes, I know the argument and partly agree with it, and it doesn't come close to justifying the basic abuses we're talking about here. Otherwise we would not bother asking users to be civil at all, and HN would be taken over completely by flamewars.
> "We value civility over truth"
Nobody said that. On HN, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not—especially not to make them look bad. Since you care about truth, that shouldn't be hard.
Your decision yesterday to kill my comment, and not kill the parent comment, was this in action. Apologies for the quotation marks.
I was intentionally (and, if you look at my posting history, non-characteristally) violating the guidelines so that you would pay attention to things. If there was was a feature in here to say "raise this comment to your attention" that didn't involve running off a string of four-letter-words, I would gladly have used it instead of doing what I did.
