Since I'm just doing what I'd do anywhere else, that amounts to asking us not to moderate. If you think this place would be ok without that, I can't agree. From my perspective such a view is a bit of a luxury that is only possible because the janitors work hard every day. But that is what a janitor would say.
Perhaps some setting where you can make it impossible to reply to a comment or thread would help. Some people will never accept that in the end the only right they have on a forum owned by someone else is to leave.
Well from the tone of your comments in this thread I would get that it is somewhat frustrating to have endless discussions about tone and moderation with people who don’t understand the cycle of forums. I wouldn’t blame you if you’d just post your message and close the discussion by leaving no reply link.
Then again I like to think I’m pretty patient but I am nowhere near as patient as you are.
Ah I see. We have that ability and use it sometimes, but more to prevent something egregiously off topic from getting going in the first place than to deny anyone their say in an existing exchange. I don't think that would work; the flames would just break out in other places, and with greater resentment. At least here it's all in one spot and we can collapse it to spare readers who aren't interested.
It would be nice if technical tricks could solve these problems, and actually there's still a lot of room for software to make a difference. But I don't think there's much substitute for persuasion: attempting to persuade the users who are breaking the site guidelines and (more importantly) the majority of the community that it's in everyone's interest to follow them.
p.s. you're right that I expressed some frustration, but I actually did that in the hope of persuading the commenter who was making objections. It's easy to feel like the mods are busybodies who make the threads worse with nannying interventions. I understand why it seems that way, because moderation comments are tedious and offtopic. In such cases I sometimes mention that those comments are even more tedious to write than they are to read (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) - the hope being that maybe they'll see that we have similar values and are not, say, authoritarian spoilsports.
It really was not. 'dang and 'sctb have done yeoman's work in establishing a tone for what's acceptable--and they have put a lot of thought into things; I occasionally email hn@ycombinator.com with a "hey is this actually cool?" and while I don't always agree with their conclusions I'm always struck by how well-considered the results are.
I don't know if the site was better, but let's say it was; it was also smaller. The same tactics don't keep working as a forum grows, so your argument is actually for letting it destroy itself, be garbage-collected by the big VM in the sky, and get replaced by newer forums which spring up, thrive for a while, and become scorched earth in turn. That's the cycle of life on the internet, but the idea of HN has always been to try to stave that fate off for longer. In 2013-14, the last year before we started moderating the site in the current style, the system was under so much pressure that there were signs of it being about to break—and in fact it did break, because the person who created it couldn't take it any more. It was an awful experience.
I definitely want to find ways to become less visible if possible. I don't much enjoy writing tedious and stupefying moderation comments, getting swarmed by wasps, accused of every bigotry, and reliving the same thing the next day. To be visible in such a role is to be the receptacle for a lot of people's anger about completely unrelated things, and you cannot expect them to treat you with scruples. That's only a tiny minority of the community, of course, but the community is large enough that it's still a lot of people—more, say, than one knows personally in life. On the plus side, one gains appreciation for Samuel Beckett as a spiritual teacher.
