HN has dedicated people like dang that moderate the comments. Derek only has himself and unfortunately it's now far too much burden for him to both write excellent content, and moderate an increasingly unruly comment section. I'm sure if someone funded Derek's blog to have dedicated moderators it could be whipped into shape and kept manageable, but who is going to write the checks?

That's a large part of the reason I posted it. The situations are not exactly parallel though. Derek's blog is his space, and he absolutely has a right to curate it as he wishes, though in the past a laissez-faire approach has worked.

I found this interesting for a few other reasons as well. It's a pretty solid data point that discourse around Covid is worse than around other scientific topics. Also, there are suggestions that a small number of people are purposefully stirring up shit (the fact that they didn't take hints that their mode of discourse was not welcome). I'm sure the same dynamic is at play on HN as well.

Ultimately, we have to come up with strategies to deal with this. I'm hopeful that Derek's approach will work for his small (but excellent) corner of the Internet.

dang would tell him to have a feature to grey out troll comments