> People here are intelligent adults

If that's true, it's because this community hasn't yet gone too far down the path to brain death followed by heat death, which has traditionally been the fate of internet communities. The HN guidelines are a way of attempting to stave off that fate: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Swipes like "What are you talking about", "Wrong", "You’re inventing things and twisting reality", "The ridiculous part is your comment", "Are you for real", "What are you talking about", "Your statement has no connection to reality", "You apparently have not read enough" (all of which unnameduser1 managed to post in just this thread!) are obviously against the HN guidelines, which ask people to be kind, not to call names, and so on: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's our experience that when internet commenters come with sharp elbows in this way, it has negative effects on community. Perhaps you feel that these things are no big deal—certainly judgments can differ. But usually people who think 'no big deal' are deriving their standards from what works well in smaller, more cohesive communities. My favorite example of that is rugby players who beat the crap out of each other and then go out drinking together afterwards. Other examples might be an academic colloquium where the participants go hard after each other's ideas, or literary circles where people trade barbed witticisms. Or simply just regular watercooler conversation or talking smack with friends.

All of those environments are richer and able to sustain a much wider range than we can here. It may not feel like it, but HN is a broadcasting channels to millions of people. Broadcasting channels can't function the way that closed, intimate environments can—they are much too incohesive. People are far quicker to hear things that haven't actually been said (or meant), have extreme reactions, respond in kind or worse, and we end up with a Tacoma Narrows Bridge effect.

So yeah, we have to operate with safety factors that to some extent make discussion more bland (a definite cost) but have the effect of preserving the community for relatively high-signal communication, as opposed to shallow hostility, which eventually leads to screaming matches and then, as I said, heat death.
Moderating HN as if it didn't need those safety factors would in my opinion be a big mistake.

If that seems wrong to you, it's probably because you're assuming a degree of stability that doesn't exist here. This is an easy assumption to make, because if X doesn't seem so bad, it's natural to think "what's wrong with X" and feel like the moderators are "heavy ham fisted" for scolding X. The problem is that X is not an end state in the state machine.

If it were merely a few sharp elbows, maybe that wouldn't be a big deal—but large internet forums are not stable this way. You can't stop at sharp elbows, because when people feel affronted, they escalate. Sharp elbows lead to nose punches, then brawls, and so on. If we start to go down that road, the most desirable and intelligent users will simply stop coming, leading to a higher concentration of low-signal/high-noise behavior, which will accelerate the feedback loop, and before long there will be no one left who feels that "people here are intelligent adults".

If anyone wants more explanation, here are some past ones:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24548414

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21633967

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15378909

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9378899

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906377

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7742471

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...