p.s. You've unfortunately been posting a bunch of unsubstantive/baity comments lately. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
The politics of your comment completely elude me; I couldn't care less about your view or theirs, have no idea what "effective altruism" is, and learned nothing from your post since it was purely snark and swipes. All I care about is that you broke the HN guidelines. You've been doing that repeatedly (e.g. posting informationless flamebait) on lots of different topics. If you keep doing it, we'll end up having to ban you for what ought to be obvious reasons (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so please stop.
If I tell you that repetitive railing against Marxism is tedious and off-topic, does that make me a Marxist? what if I tell you that repetitive railing against capitalism is just as tedious and off-topic?
The truth is that we're bored, tired, profoundly do not care, and feel exactly the same way about all such comments—the ones you'd consider most wrong and offensive, as well as the ones you'd most passionately agree with. Why? Because they're all mirror images of each other.
But it's probably inevitable that Hacker News will wither and go away (or at least stop being a place that attracts people like me). Eventually, somethign will replace HN like something replaced Slashdot (which had fantastic comments with not that much moderation, back in the day) and Usenet.
No, because new people wouldn't be informed about behaviour that breaks the site rules nearly as much, and thus continue breaking the site rules which makes it less attractive for the "old guard" to interact and more attractive for people who find posts that break the site rules appealing.
It would still stay decent for a few years, but after a decade or so it'd be unrecognizable IMO.
Of course, that prediction was sourced from out of thin air and unsubstantiated guesswork. Just writing my reasons of why I think so.
Objectively speaking you are one of the least-bad moderators I've seen in 30+ years of internet communications. But I wish you'd stop giving me a hard time about my comments as they are intended in good faith and written carefully with specific goals in mind (changing opinions as well as being amusing) and I honestly see far worse crap than my comments go unchallenged.
Thanks—I appreciate the kind words. I think there are two things going on here.
First, I'm sure you're right that far worse crap goes unchallenged. But that's not because it's ok (it's not), nor because moderators are choosing to go easier on them (we're not). Rather, it's for the same reason that only a small portion of speeding drivers actually gets pulled over and ticketed: there are way too many to catch them all. In other words, when you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we simply didn't see it—there are far too many posts for us to read them all. You can help by flagging such cases or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Second, I believe you that you're posting in good faith and with good intentions. Unfortunately, intent isn't enough—it doesn't communicate itself on the internet, especially not in these tiny little blobs of comment text. You have to include enough information to disambiguate your intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's common for commenters to assume that their posts will land with readers in a way that is consistent with the intent they have in mind. Unfortunately, they often don't—because while you have your intent in your head, the rest of us don't (I don't mean "you" personally, of course—it's the same for everybody). This is what leads to the 'rebound' phenomenon where someone posts a snarky one-liner or otherwise breaks the site guidelines, and then when a moderator asks them not to, they reply with the thoughtful, substantive comment they actually had in their head*. The problem is that all that good information doesn't communicate itself. You have to spell it out explicitly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. You've unfortunately been posting a bunch of unsubstantive/baity comments lately. Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.