You're a great contributor and I appreciate your passion. In fact, any internet forum with HN's mandate which is kragenless has got to be fucking up somehow. I particularly appreciate that your passion is completely unpredictable. That's extremely unusual, (and believe me, after doing this for 8 years, I know). So please come back sooner than 81 days, or at least make future breaks shorter rather than longer.

You've been at this longer than I have, so I don't feel like I have much to offer by way of insight, but let me try one thing. Any large, open internet forum has a serious upper bound on how good it can ever get. Misinformation and ignorance float in like open sewage. There's nothing we can do about that. It's frustrating. Actually it's crazy-making, because the more we all do to improve the community and make it better, the more it invites an influx of sewage, because sewage-spewers always want to spew in the highest-quality environment they can find, and there are zero barriers to entry here. (Lest I hurt anyone else's feelings, I should add that I'm not calling the other commenter a sewage-spewer, even if he may be wrong about the tradeoff between security and usability. Rather, this phenomenon is best described in the general case.)

Given that there's zero we can do to prevent this, the only agency we have is around how to react to it. There, I think we've learned something. Misinformation is not best combated by attacking the misinformed. One of my teachers once told me: "I did a Ph.D. in psychology, and here is what I learned from my Ph.D.: that punishment is not good for learning." Rather, misinformation is best combated by relating with the misinformed person while correcting the misinformation. How do you relate with a misinformed person? That's up for grabs. I don't think we've learned any formulas for that; the only thing I feel pretty sure of is that it can't be faked. Clearly, though, "you're full of shit" is not the way to get there.

Attacking the misinformed person puts their nervous system into flight-or-fight mode, which on the internet reduces to fight-mode. Worse, it fires a polarizing laser into the community, because while some readers will agree, others will be on the opposite side of the question, and still others will be neutral on the question itself but will freak out in response to the attack. Attack invites counterattack, and what gets lost in this process is the open state in which people are available for new information. Fight mode is like a muscle spasm, while receptivity requires relaxation.

The model underlying how we moderate HN doesn't have to do with politeness. I agree that enforcing politeness does not improve epistemic functioning; it just creates a fear of breaking the rules, and fear is a shut-down state. Meanwhile in other people it provokes a 'wtf? fuck politeness' reaction—and quite rightly.

The policy here isn't about politeness—nor 'civility', which is a word we stopped using a year or two ago for similar reasons. If I had to pick a word as of right now, I might pick 'openness'. We're interested in what practices of behavior are the ones that can encourage each other to stay in an open state—that is, a state in which we're able to hear each other and exchange interesting information.

The bottom line is that any large internet forum is going to be an 'echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions'—any attempt to prevent that is doomed—but we have the opportunity to be a somewhat interesting echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions, that is, a community which is able to respond interestingly, and the way to have that is to practice openness and the things which encourage openness in others.