> Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate that.

Not tolerating it isn't as simple as you might think. You made it harder in this case by breaking the rules yourself. If you hadn't, I could have banned the other account. But if I had banned the other account without also banning you, they (or someone else) would have asked why it was ok for you to break the rules but not ok for them to.

(I didn't want to ban your account because when I looked at its history, I didn't see much egregious abuse, although I did see you casually breaking the site guidelines quite a bit.)

You did the same thing again just an hour ago. That is, you replied to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39891679 by breaking the site guidelines yourself, thus preventing moderation from working the way it normally would.

Edit:

Since you're more or less asking why moderation works the way it does in a case like this, I thought it might be interesting to unpack the following sentence from a moderation point of view: "I didn't react the way I did because I thought someone was "wrong", but because this is a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation, followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults. Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate that."

This may sound odd, but when I read that through (let's say) moderator glasses, it reduces to two things: "they [i.e. the other person] were wrong" and "they were breaking the rules". At risk of being tedious, I can show the steps I take from what you wrote to those two things. Maybe this will be of interest, maybe not, but it's certainly a representative example.

> a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation

When I read this, I have to take out the parts that I (as a moderator) can't act on. The first thing that has to go is the word "deliberately". That refers to intent, which is difficult to assess on the internet and impossible to prove. I can't act on that. (Past explanations on this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

Commenters use words like "deliberately" all the time about other commenters that they're annoyed with. Such words are intensifiers for expressing how they feel about the other person. In processing such language as a moderator, I have to cut "deliberately", and I also have to cut "a clear case" for the same reason. These things are not at all clear; they just feel clear to the people embroiled in an argument. One can safely assume that the other person feels just as "clearly" about oneself.

Once I cut "deliberately" and "a clear case", we have:

> repeatedly spreading misinformation

The word "misinformation" is another that commenters use a lot, mostly as an intensifier for how they feel about the other person or their view. It's not so different from saying "deliberately wrong". If, again, I cut out the assumption about intent, it reduces to "wrong".

In other words, from a moderation perspective your phrase "a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation" really does boil down to "they were wrong". There are additional layers of intensity in what you wrote, and I can listen to them as an expression of how you feel, but it's no basis for moderation. (Nor is someone being wrong; more about that in a minute.)

That leaves:

> followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults

Yes, this is basically how the other user was breaking the site guidelines and what I scolded them for.

Putting all that together, if I go back to your point as a whole, which can be restated like this:

> Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation, followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults

... and if I run that through the processing steps I just outlined, for me qua moderator it reduces to: "I don't understand how you can tolerate someone being wrong and breaking the rules." Let's take those two in turn.

Someone being wrong is not a moderation issue. People sometimes want it to be, but asking the mods to be the arbiters of truth is a disastrous idea—it would satisfy no one and enrage everyone–a sure path to destroying the community. Nor do we have any power to do so—it's not as if we have a truth meter (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Sorting out what's true from what's false is the community's job, not the mods'. Asking mods to decide the truth is like asking the janitor which books belong on library shelves.

So in the end the sentence reduces to "I don't understand how you can tolerate someone breaking the rules", and the answer to that is that I didn't tolerate it. I scolded the user, warned them, and asked them to follow the rules from now on (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887733). As I said, I might have done more if you hadn't also been breaking the rules; but when two warring parties are both doing that, the dominant variable becomes the community's concern for even-handedness. That's a complex issue in its own right, and because it's about the community as a whole rather than individual users, it takes precedence.