dang, in the future I'll do my best to not respond to personal attacks like [x1], and downvote, flag, and move on instead. And thank you for the (hopefully not absolutely) thankless job of maintaining the level of discourse here.
I'm sad, though, that none of the incredibly uncivil comments towards the OP in this thread merited a "not cool" remark from you.
The OP is both a commenter on HN in this thread[o1], and the author of the linked blog post. The hostility towards him is destructive to HN.
This was a part of reason why I was so active in this thread in particular. If the admins aren't going to call out hostile behavior, someone has to. What was said to OP merits at least a response, and there's none from the mods so far.
By calling out my comments, but not those, you are sending a signal as to which kind is welcome on HN.
Examples (personal attacks towards to the OP):
<read in the context of OP describing pain from chemical burns, as diagnosed by his doctor, after his headphones spontaneously caught fire>
[a1] "Sounds like a hypochondriac person"; when called out, doubles down with "Since when is hypochondriac an insult?"
[a2] "OP does sound like a hypochondriac, like, skin touching some warm object and worries about nerve damage. OP should go out more."
[a3] "That sort of paranoia doesn't help. In fact it may cause psychosomatic symptoms (nocebo effect)."
[a4] "Everyone is aware of the risks, there were a bunch of stories about airplane cell phone fires a few years ago. What are <you> suggesting people do? Headphones only function while on your head."
[a5] "Well, someone paying $400 for a pair of headphones is probably not very knowledgeable outside their narrow field of expertise."
[a6] "There is an annoying trend among people that expect everything to be perfectly safe. It seems to be a symptom of an overly sheltered existence."
[a7] "If the author is thinking about suing, they'd be wiser to not eviscerate their own credibility as an engineer
Select comments to me:
<The thread you are commenting in was in response to this one>
[x1] "You're spamming the thread with dramatic comments that are premised on this not being a one-off freak accident. Nice of you to finally acknowledge the possibility.
<polite language, hostile intent>
[x2] "You're not the OP, you are monopolizing this thread with more bits than you'd normally have a right to, I suggest - mildly - that you reconsider whether or not you think this is a proportional response to something that does not concern you directly or that it is possible that you are over-reacting. " -- TL;DR: I am over-reacting and I have exhausted my "right" to talk here.
Other off-topic flamewar starters:
[f1] "The American response, to a non-American, is fascinating. You believe that you “deserve” compensation, but at the same time you guys are all crazy on independence and don’t-tell-me-how-to-behave and whatever else. But as soon as a thing goes wrong you want money for it. It’s like you don’t believe in the concept of an accident."
[f2] "Have a look at insurance premiums that doctors have to pay, especially the high-risk specializations (like neurosurgery). I guess I don't have to explain why they're so high."
___________________
I have been a long-time contributor to the discussions here, and would be sad to see more of the below becoming the norm. Your response that you have seen this comment will be greatly appreciated. HN is only as good as the community here is.
I responded to you because you posted a massive number of comments to this thread, including a bunch of low-quality provocations that kept the flamewar going.
As for the other comments, a bunch of those were correctly flagkilled by users. At least one is by a banned account whose comment was never anything but [dead] in the first place—obviously that doesn't need moderating. Some others you linked to don't particularly stand out to me. But really, this is all a bit of a red herring. Moderation can't be completely consistent in the first place because we can't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. In a massive flamewar like this, there's no way we're going to see everything. You can always point out to us at hn@ycombinator.com when people are breaking the guidelines. But responding by pointing the finger (or ten fingers) at others when we ask you to stop breaking them, isn't really the best way to communicate about that.
Thank you for the response! Point taken re: communication.
Re: pointing fingers - I hope you won't take it as such. To rephrase - I hear you, and I'm toning my style down. If you have resources, I hope you could pay more attention to the comments of the kind I linked, as they do slip through. I wish flagging had a reason field, to separate those from ones that merely don't contribute to discussion. And a single comment from you like "this language doesn't belong here" could do so much more than mere greying out.
This is an ask, not an excuse or justification. As for me, I'll try to make your job easier by reducing the input to your task queue from my end :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I had to ask you about this just recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29501704, and before that too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28213714. I realize you're not doing it intentionally but we need you to fix this.