Man this is disappointing. He was one of the most interesting accounts I would search out to see his comments on C# and dotnet. I think he adds value to the site, and is a contrarian against the general common opinions.

Programming language debates can be interesting and fruitful for people to learn new things in the discussion. Maybe it comes with a little too much hostility sometimes, but banning seems like a pure loss. Hopefully he asks to come back and can constrain himself more.

I don't disagree and hope that they'll commit to following the guidelines in the future so we can unban them.

Accounts with pre-existing flamewar agendas* are definitely not a good thing on HN, and users were complaining.

* or actually any pre-existing agenda. Those are repetitive and repetition is anti-optimal for HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

Disappointing it didn't happen sooner. They've been shitting up Go threads every chance they get for months, if not longer. Pretty always with cheap "zomg Go devs r stoopid"-type potshots that add no value at all. These are not serious discussions anyone learns from, they're hostile toxic puddles of waste that add no value to anyone and only serve to chase off actual people with expertise (include those critical of Go) wanting to have a serious conversation, because why would someone with expertise put up with someone who is not interested in anything but talk shit?

They've also been advocating jail sentences and even wishing death of people they disagree with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39285838 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39285851 – that alone should be a near-bannable offence IMO, and underscores that this isn't some person who occasionally breaks the rules on one topic. I kind of regret not emailing Dan about that last one – I probably should have.

I actually have a long list of their comment for a blog post I plan to write about how social dynamics on the internet, and they're not there as an example of friendly kind of people on the internet. Their highly toxic behaviour stands out that much.

That they may also post some good comments on C# or .NET is besides the point. Bad behaviour is bad behaviour, and not cancelled out by some good comments elsewhere.

They? lol

Look, I don't 100% agree with that either, and I don't really want to "defend" someone else's comments from 2 years ago. I just think it's strange to ban people just for having an naïve or off-colour opinion, esp. if they're otherwise not causing any problems.

It's five months ago, not two years. And it's not an "off-colour opinion", it's just assholery. My point was that this isn't a one-off "everyone has a bad day"-type thing, but a consistent pattern that's been going on for months and that it's frequent and severe enough for people to take notice.

If you want to have vaguely serious discussions then you need to treat people with a modicum of respect, otherwise all the people wanting to have a serious discussion will just leave and what you end up with is just the assholes swimming in a sea of cynicism, negativity, and general assholery. So yes, they're absolutely causing problems.

It's a fine line, but passionate high energy discussion makes this place more interesting than if people with strong opinions were banned. It would become boring, "safe", and conventional. Everyone would be saying the same things.

A wise man once said:

"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."

Maybe if people could be muted or something would be compromise.

There is no discussion. What are you even supposed to "discuss" on the comment that started this thread? This isn't someone engaging in a bit of an aggressive way, it's merely an expression of negativity and nothing else.

You don't see me crapping up every TypeScript or PHP thread with that, and when I do it's 1) on-topic, and 2) a criticism that has more substance than "bruh-huh, TypeScript bad". Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37765713 – this is something you can agree or disagree with and have a serious conversation about. "Go sux, just use .NET" ... not so much. Especially when that same discussion recurs on every damn thread because this user has posted dozens of those types of comments. It gets very tedious very quickly.

And muting people isn't really a solution; any new user who hasn't built up a "block list" will just see a community of assholes, so it's not really a substitute. Even with blocklist features, there needs to be a baseline of acceptable behaviour.