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Comment by tprynn | Hacker News Reader

I flagged this comment because I believe it is far outside of appropriate discussion to dehumanize someone in the way your comment does. For other commenters, the original comment before editing said:

"And now this thing works for the NYTimes."

and after an initial edit, it says:

"And now this... 'person' works for the NYTimes."

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> If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Please follow the rules.

You called another human being a 'thing', and then corrected it to '"person"' (with the quotation marks). And now, of course, you'd like others to follow the rules.

You disgust me, because you are disgusting.

That's egregious. You can't comment like this, regardless of how bad another comment was. Commenters to HN need to either be civil or not post.

These high-dudgeon internet spats would be merely ludicrous if they didn't also have the potential to destroy what little community we have here. Both you and hitekker injected poisons: he by trolling the thread by being vicious while pretending not to, and you with a trope of the aggressive online shaming culture. We've all seen what these things lead to elsewhere, so we have no choice but to ban people if they do them repeatedly here. Please don't.

Then delete the comments. If we're not supposed to respond to something that terrible, don't leave it on the site.

What you're not supposed to do is take someone else's bad comment as a license to violate the rules yourself.

HN does 'delete' comments in one way (flagging by user or moderator), but this is not a complete solution because such comments appear before they are killed.

It's pretty rich to tell others to follow the rules after you just broke them yourself in a far worse way, and set the thread on fire while doing so. Whether you intended to or not, what you posted amounts to trolling. We ban accounts that do that. Please don't do it again.

Instead, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules in both letter and spirit, regardless of how you feel about journalistic ethics or how badly someone once behaved.

Someone who is posting obvious flamebait does not get to complain about people not following the rules.

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