> Funnily enough, my comment upthread originally included the statement that this has been so consistent a problem in the past that I actually anticipate it when I see your username. I took that out because I didn't want it to seem like I was picking on you personally. But since you mention "there are usernames I recognize by name", maybe it's helpful information.

Yes, I had seen that, which is why I mentioned that in my comment.

> Other people breaking the rules doesn't make it ok to break them yourself. That's the way we end up in a downward spiral, since it always feels like the other person started it and/or did worse.

I understand, and I'm not saying that it makes it okay. I'm explaining that, when people see patterns in which violations of rules get called out publicly and which don't, it sends a message. The reason I'm letting you know because I believe that's not the message that your team intends to send (if it were, I wouldn't be bothering).

> It's not true that we take no visible action against people posting bigoted comments. I've personally done that hundreds if not thousands of times. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.

The last time you and I interacted on here (Jan 2019) was in a thread where you took issue with a snarky comment I wrote, and I responded by pointing out the same thing - that I was responding to a person who was even more aggressive, clearly acting in bad faith, and accusing me of "racism" for explaining why a post was offensive to people of certain ethnic backgrounds (including my own). My comment apparently warranted a public moderator response; the parent that I responded to apparently did not. The other was eventually flagged, but only much later - long after the post had fallen off the front page.

Perhaps moderators don't necessarily read the parent post when responding to a comment, but because most readers assume that mods do, a situation like that makes it look like moderators are condoning one type of behavior over the other.

It doesn't help that, in any system that relies on user flags for reporting behavior, users from minority backgrounds ultimately are flagged at a higher rate, even if they adhere to the rules the same proportion of the time. There's peer-reviewed research that's explained this phenomenon, but most of it boils down to the obvious dynamic: people are less likely to report objectionable behavior if they agree with the content, and people are more likely to disagree with content that openly expresses viewpoints from minority groups.

> You can help by flagging those comments, so that moderators are more likely to see them, and in egregious cases it's helpful to email hn@ycombinator.com.

I have typically avoided flagging these comments because I've (perhaps incorrectly) been under the impression that they're not actioned - in all the years I've been on this site, I don't think I've ever seen moderators publicly calling out this sort of "civil bigotry" that I'm describing.

However, if that's not the case, I'll make note of that and will flag those from now on instead of responding myself.