Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've had to ask you many times not to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Usually I agree with your calls on things being unsubstantive, but this one kinda seems fine? I don't think it's flame bait, just emotive language? And the substantive point being made is that online gambling should be illegal.
(apologies if arguing about mod decisions is frowned upon, I didn't see anything in the rules about it)
You haven’t said anything, or at least I haven’t seen it. There’s no inbox here and I don’t always read old comments. If you have pointed it out before I don’t care, I haven’t seen it. If you want to point something out, then maybe email me about it the just time you see it, otherwise I’m not trolling through my old threads that often so you’ll have to accept that this is the first I’ve seen you ask.
I’m respect your wishes but you can’t say you have told me anything if I didn’t see it here, sorry Dan but that’s only fair since there’s no way for me to see your message unless I randomly go back.
If you want to ensure people see these messages, then that’s a feature you’ll need to add. I’m fine with you using the email on my account for this purpose, too, but I’m not fine with getting a single message from you here and you expecting me to have seen anything else you’ve said in the past. As far as I’m concerned this is the first I’ve seen you ask me about this.
These are the previous moderation replies, and you certainly saw some of them, since you responded. Interestingly, sometimes your responses were positive and sometimes rather hostile (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877994). But we're not asking you anything different than we ask of others here.
There’s no flame bait here just some swearing and rough language. I’ll cut back because you asked (once, I’ve not seen your responses other than this one), but I don’t think I’m out of line.
Also if people were downvoting my comments it’d be different but it’s just you for a frw recent ones down modding then, because before you get here they were up or even. Moderators should focus on those truly displaying bad behavior, I’m just swearing and saying relevant things.
I have a very long history of good comments here, arguing otherwise seems suspect, honestly.
I’ll back off like you say but I don’t agree at all. I’ve read the guidelines and tend to follow them.
Edit: I see like 3-4 questionable comments from me, two of who’ve are barely questionable. I get what you’re saying about the language but it’s really amazing you’ve targeted me here today, this us such low hanging fruit here, don’t you have better things to deal with? I’ll write better comments but I’m just really annoyed at your characterization of my behavior, it is very unfair in my eyes. I’ve done very good comments for ages and emotional language like this is rare for me. I expect better from mods here.
I appreciate the expression of feeling here! I know it sucks to get upbraided by moderators (and we don't enjoy it either). But it's definitely not personal. The moderation response would have been the same regardless of user, since we're not focused on usernames to begin with.
What attracts our attention are, in this order: (1) a post that breaks the site guidelines; (2) the other comments by that account; (3) whether we've posted moderation replies to that account before. It's true that that the username is what links (1), (2), and (3), but what we're paying attention to is mostly the content.
I think one factor here may be the tendency, which we all have, to underestimate the provocation in your own statements and overestimate it in others [1]. Those two distortions compound into quite a skew [2], and makes it easy to feel like one is being singled out or treated unfairly [3].
Beyond that, when you run across other posts breaking the site guidelines and going unmoderated, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that the moderators are biased or secretly agreeing with those other posts. But this is a mistake. Overwhelmingly the reason for this is simply that we didn't see those other posts. We can't moderate what we don't see, and we don't come close to seeing everything on HN (or even 10% of it) - there is way too much. [4]
This comment was unnecessary and very distracting from a far more interesting discussion in the replies to the commenter you are attempting to condescend.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(p.s. Just to pre-empt the usual: no, this is not a defense of Big Gambling, just an attempted defense of HN thread quality.)