> Perhaps your comment would be more constructive if you could say how my comments break the rules. Help me grow and help me follow the rules by being specific.

That would of course be best; the problem is that it takes at least 10x more time and energy to produce such explanations, if not more, than it does to write the ordinary sort of moderation reply. I don't have nearly enough cycles to be able to do that, so most of the time I have to rely on linking to the rules and trusting users to figure out how they broke them.

There's another aspect too: offering a detailed explanation frequently backfires, in the sense that the commenter comes back with a counterargument that's 2x or 5x as long, rejecting the explanation and making complex demands for further clarification. This doesn't always happen, but it's common. It's physically impossible to continue all such conversations to a satisfactory conclusion, but leaving them incomplete often leaves things in a worse state than not having tried.

That said, I'll try and give you a few details:

It ought to be obvious that beginning a comment with "Yawn." breaks HN's rule "Don't be snarky", and given the nature of this topic, also this rule: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Beyond that, several of your comments in this thread were full of flamewar rhetoric, by which I mean sensational/indignant language that escalates the hostility level in a discussion and comes across as aggressive to the other side, if not the other person. Not only is that not the curious conversation that HN is supposed to be for, it actively destroys it.

An example is your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39148777. The first part ("Yawn.") was egregiously against HN's rules; you should never be posting that way, least of all on a topic this flameprone. The second sentence ("Opening a genocide trial is an implicit condemnation [etc.]") was fine from a guidelines point of view—it may be factually wrong, as some argued in response, but it isn't against HN's rules to be wrong in good faith, and I wouldn't have made a moderation reply to just that. If you had limited your comment to that sentence, it would have been fine.

The sentence after that, though ("Trying to score cheap rhetorical “gotchas” while avoiding the substance of the point is trite.") is an informationless putdown and name-calling of precisely the sort the HN guidelines ask people to omit. Moreover, it crosses into personal attack. You should never be posting that way to HN, least of all on a topic this divisive. And the final sentence ("Especially when you’re technically wrong.") does more of the same: it's a swipe, and unduly personal.

You're going to produce flamewars when you post like this to a large public internet forum (like HN) on the best of days. To do it in the context of the most inflammatory topic that exists right now is not ok at all. I realize that the comment you were replying to also was being provocative and also broke the site guidelines (by implying you hadn't read an article), but that doesn't make it ok to reply the way you did. Commenters need to follow the rules regardless of what others are doing; otherwise we just end up in a downward spiral.

More than that, you have a history of posting this sort of aggressive rhetoric and attacking other users on other topics as well (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38245766 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34185716). It should be obvious to anyone who is familiar with HN's guidelines that we have to ban accounts that post like that.

> my comment doesn’t seem any different than many others here you didn’t feel the need to critique

There are far too many posts for us to read them all. I spent the entire day in this thread yesterday, reading comments and posting moderation replies when I saw commenters breaking HN's rules regardless of their views on the underlying topic, and still didn't come close to seeing them all.

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. It's a mistake to assume that I saw a comment and just "didn't feel the need to critique". Worse, if you go from that to assuming that the mods must be biased against your viewpoint, that's more or less guaranteed to be a non sequitur. Everyone with strong feelings on a topic, on every side of every position, feels that way (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).