“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

Inflammatory generalizations with no evidence like this count as flamebait, so please eschew them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Males tend to challenge higher ranking males.

You're making an astoundingly general claim and chimpanzees are not going to back it up. I understand that you might disagree, but there are community standards of discourse here that are not being met and we need you to work on that if you're going to comment.

I didn't have time to dig up more studies but I certainly could if I was paid to. My claim is true and all research on this topic has overwhelmingly confirmed my claim on male group behavior in apes, humans included.

In any case I've acted in good faith to contribute positively to the discourse. I haven't antagonized anyone and I've provided relevant new information that might shine new light on the discussion at hand. If anyone isn't meeting the standards of civil discourse, it's you and whoever flagged my comment. You'd think people on HN would be curious about new ideas. Instead all potential positive discourse is shut down due to a single individual's subjective judgment of what is inflammatory, despite it being scientific consensus. It's clear this isn't a space for civil discourse amongst reasonable people.

The problem is that they aren't new ideas in the sense that matters here. They fall into very well-grooved grooves and we know from experience where those lead. It isn't groovy.

When we moderate HN like this, we don't mean to imply that you weren't posting in good faith. We're just being vigilant about what is known to cause flamewars. Flamewars are the #1 problem here because they consume everything they touch and can easily lead to the death-by-fire of the forum. We're basically just being Smokey Bear, or Smoky Bear's ranger friend.

It's interesting to observe that the above holds true even if you're right in everything you said. The old question "would you rather be right or alive?" applies here.

What would be new in the sense that matters? I think it was a natural flow of discussion: someone gives their perspective on an event, another person shares a related scientific fact that supports that perspective. You aren't being clear, instead you are throwing out abstract words like flamewar, flamebait, groovy, etc. I'm not getting the memo. Please be specific, what exactly was wrong with that post? Do you have a standardized list of topics that you guys censor for fear of flamewars? Can you share that list with the community? If not, this seems arbitrary, illiberal, anti-intellectual, dictatorial.

Sorry, but this is the classic legalistic gambit of the troll.

It's not hard to figure out the intended use of the site. If you don't want to use it that way, please don't post here and please don't make new accounts to get around the restrictions.

Dang, you are not listening to user problems.

I was moderator for more than 10 years on linux.org.ua and nobody told me that I was bad moderator. I also regular user on other forums/sites, so I have view on the problem from both sides.

HN is badly moderated. However, most problems with moderation/flames/etc., can be fixed using technology or by writing better rules. If you are interesting in fixing of HN problems, contact me: vlisivka@gmail.com .

Happy to listen to user opinions and do so every day, but when someone has a history of not following the site rules, as you do, their complaints become less compelling. This can be fixed by reading https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart, and using at as intended from now on.

Well, I agree that I'm not the best HN user, but I'm not a young inexperienced person: I survived few assassinations, and lost few friends, which were not so lucky. I also quite busy with my work, my startup, education, science, history, politics, and some other topic, so I will not post something just to insult somebody.

IMHO, HN can be improved to automatically filter out discussions. Imagine, we have a magic system, which automagically labeled all comments as a) on topic or not on topic b) improvement, critics, opinion, correction, controversy, alternative view, support, trolling, joke, fun, suggestion, discussion, flame, etc. c) history, politics, physics, mathematics, engineering, computer science, programming, etc. Then we can just place some labels on top of each submission with number of comments for that label. By default, only on-topic comments with good labels should be enabled. But user should be free to enable other topics as well.

Now, we need to imagine how to implement such automagic labeling system with minimum of up-keeping cost. IMHO, first we should allow user to label his comments himself. If comment is labeled properly, then user will not punished. If comment labeled incorrectly, then other users can vote to change label with cumulative score (if user has higher rating, his vote worth more), and user will be automatically punished if label changed from good to bad.

On-topic/off-topic should be implemented as checkbox on submit form. Other labels can be implemented as hashtags or collapsible boxes. Users should be able to add or remove labels to other posts, if necessary, when they have high enough rating for such action and label. Users should be able to chose which labels they want or don't want to see with reasonable defaults.

IMHO, it's much better to be constructive ans ask user to label his post as "#politics #flame" instead of forbidding him to post.

Example:

A post title. yyyy.mm.dd hh:mm on-topic(12) off-topic(21)

vlisivka x hours ago | off-topic(up dn) #hn-site #suggestion (add label) I have a suggestion about how to improve HN.