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Comment by jk700 | Hacker News Reader

Except maybe for current comment (not really, HN just has more replies on anything these days), nothing actually turned into flamewars, most out of his few "flamewar" comments over many months barely had any replies at all and were just flagged. It seems you are labeling them as flamewar just so you could justify banning him. Possibly because he expressed opinions you consider "politically incorrect" today and you want to suppress such opinions on HN.

Also you can't claim he ignored your many requests to stop, because you never made a single request to stop what can be interpreted the same way by both of you, he probably thought he followed them. Again, you were using this as manufactured justification to ban him.

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When someone is routinely dropping lit matches in a dry forest, "he only started one wildfire" is obviously no defense.

Anyone who sincerely wanted to follow the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html would be behaving completely differently. Sincere misunderstandings are generally quite easy to clear up. If someone doesn't sincerely want to follow the site guidelines, they shouldn't be posting here. We're trying for a specific kind of community.

Even the worst case is easy to fix. If someone doesn't want to be banned, they're always welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that they'll follow the rules in the future.

No one can sincerely follow those rules, because they are too subjective. The only reason people tolerate them is because they are not enforced. But when you do enforce something from them, it's always unjust and unfair, like in this case.

> When someone is routinely dropping lit matches in a dry forest, "he only started one wildfire" is obviously no defense.

He has lots and lots of comments of which only a couple that you didn't like. Absolutely nothing like "routinely dropping lit matches".

The vast majority of commenters have no problem following the rules. It's not as if it's hard to avoid getting banned here.

>Also you can't claim he ignored your many requests to stop, because you never made a single request to stop what can be interpreted the same way by both of you, he probably thought he followed them. Again, you were using this as manufactured justification to ban him.

One could attempt to make this same argument over virtually any ban ever. There doesn't need to be a reason in my opinion. HN has never allowed freedom to express any opinion you want. A pattern of unpopular opinions tends to result in an automatic hellban, for example.

No, dang is purposely vague in all of his warnings, as if he wants to make sure people won't be able to follow them and it will be up to him to decide whether they did or didn't.

If somehow he slips and they manage to do it, he will rephrase them next time, make them more vague and more subjective to make sure they don't. Like I saw a warning he gave someone to stop creating new accounts every couple of comments, but then in other warnings he stretched his definition farther and farther to include more comments and more time.

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