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.