Moderation is dominated by randomness - we don't come close to seeing all the comments on HN or even all the comments in any large thread. That's 90% of the answer to "why did my comment get moderated and not those other ones". (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
The reason I saw your comment rather than the other ones is that it was heavily upvoted and right near the top of the page—and that's just the problem: snarky, shallow comments attract upvotes, which causes them to occupy prime real estate, crowding out better discussion, and that distorts the character of the thread and ultimately of the site itself. This is one of the biggest problems HN faces, if not the biggest.
You can say that this problem is caused more by upvotes than by comments, and I agree - but we can't address the problem at the upvote level (at least not publicly), and anyway if the flypaper weren't hung in the first place, the flies wouldn't have thronged to it.
It's impossible not to "selectively apply" the rules, the same way that not every speeder gets a speeding ticket, and of course when you've seen other people speeding worse than you (which they invariably do), it feels unfair that you're the one who gets the ticket. The main things to realize are (1) it's nothing personal; (2) the randomness evens out in the long run; and (3) the only way to keep HN going in a good way is for enough commenters to understand this and take up the work of following the site guidelines (or really, the intended spirit of the site) even when they see others not doing it. I hope this helps explain things a bit...
The reason I saw your comment rather than the other ones is that it was heavily upvoted and right near the top of the page—and that's just the problem: snarky, shallow comments attract upvotes, which causes them to occupy prime real estate, crowding out better discussion, and that distorts the character of the thread and ultimately of the site itself. This is one of the biggest problems HN faces, if not the biggest.
You can say that this problem is caused more by upvotes than by comments, and I agree - but we can't address the problem at the upvote level (at least not publicly), and anyway if the flypaper weren't hung in the first place, the flies wouldn't have thronged to it.
It's impossible not to "selectively apply" the rules, the same way that not every speeder gets a speeding ticket, and of course when you've seen other people speeding worse than you (which they invariably do), it feels unfair that you're the one who gets the ticket. The main things to realize are (1) it's nothing personal; (2) the randomness evens out in the long run; and (3) the only way to keep HN going in a good way is for enough commenters to understand this and take up the work of following the site guidelines (or really, the intended spirit of the site) even when they see others not doing it. I hope this helps explain things a bit...