Comment by jrflowers
5 days ago
>HN is a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That is exactly the point that I made. This is a website where the pretty much the only hard and fast unambiguous rules are about style and decorum. It is not hard to draw a line from “it doesn’t matter what you say so long as you say it nicely enough” to “people are nicely saying terrible things on that website.”
I’ve seen the “You can post anything on hn if you phrase it right” joke in group chats for years now, so this thread isn’t surprising to me in the least.
I’m not really sure how you and I could disagree on this. You are the admin here, this has been the worst thread you’ve ever seen, and you say that changes that would prevent this would be impossible and in major conflict with the “spirit-of-the-law” culture here. It does not seem possible to simultaneously claim “this is not the culture here” and “we would have to sacrifice the culture here to prevent this”
Sorry but dang's rationale is just nonsensical at this point. Spirit of law does not mean having no articulable laws, or principles, or ethics whatsoever. This moderator seems very philosophically confused, and would benefit from further education in philosophy, social studies, political-economic theory, and related subjects. Especially if this incident is bothering them so much, it is an opportunity for reflection and learning. It is tempting to think up one's own theories, about "bad mobs", etc., but a lot of these issues are well-trodden by incredible writings of intellectuals and thinkers, so why attempt to reinvent the wheel and commit all these pitfalls in the process.