For clarity's sake, I was not talking about HN in this remark:
> If one person’s presence is derailing the conversation for some reason, don’t automatically decide they must be the bad guy. The absolute worst thing you can do is to tell that person to shut up and leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way. This includes everyone rebutting their comments that they are no longer allowed to defend because they were asked to stop posting.
I belonged to a different forum for a time where that was official mod policy. Being rate limited, having a comment flagged to death by other users or even being shadow banned on HN where other users can still vouch for your comments is not the same as being publicly told to stop participating in X discussion by a mod and then punished if you dare to defend yourself as others talk all kinds of trash about you while the mods do nothing about it because they are fine with some in-crowd group being awful to some out-crowd group and actively encourage that as a matter of more-or-less official policy.
> If one person’s presence is derailing the conversation for some reason, don’t automatically decide they must be the bad guy. The absolute worst thing you can do is to tell that person to shut up and leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way. This includes everyone rebutting their comments that they are no longer allowed to defend because they were asked to stop posting.
I belonged to a different forum for a time where that was official mod policy. Being rate limited, having a comment flagged to death by other users or even being shadow banned on HN where other users can still vouch for your comments is not the same as being publicly told to stop participating in X discussion by a mod and then punished if you dare to defend yourself as others talk all kinds of trash about you while the mods do nothing about it because they are fine with some in-crowd group being awful to some out-crowd group and actively encourage that as a matter of more-or-less official policy.