Comment by dang

Apologies from me also, for misreading your comment and getting a bit defensive!

I don't think locking comments out of threads would be in keeping with HN's mandate. We try to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1]. Preventing users from commenting, and reading each other's comments, would go against that.

I also feel like it would be a shallow technical trick to avoid facing the deeper issue of us all learning how to be with each other, including with others who come from different backgrounds and have different views [2]. I'd rather face the hard problem squarely and see what we can do about it together—even though this brings many cases that suck and feel awful.

Also, I don't think the community would like it. HN users would probably just keep posting until they got a thread where they could comment. I try not to fight the community in that way. Having made the mistake of doing so in the past, I can tell you that (1) you can't win, and (2) it is painful!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 is a longer post about that if anyone wants more