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Comment by mmt | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is there's no way to know the "spirit" without knowledge of its history.

Why not just say what you mean, instead? If the desire is "no replies that are or might spark a controversy", then why doesn't the rule say that?

Better yet, go all the way and forbid replies entirely. That achieves the same stifling of conversation, in this one context where it's deemed "terrible", without the enforcement that can seem capricious and arbitrary (as you say yourself, "it's often not easy to tell the difference") and can needlessly shame an otherwise well-intentioned commenter.

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I get that you feel strongly against this rule and how we choose to moderate the Who Is Hiring threads. But we've been over this at least three times, for over a year now, and I'm not sure what else to say. I don't see anything new to respond to here. You just strongly disagree. That's fine; I understand your argument and it's a good one; it's just not as strong, in my mind, as the opposite consideration. It's my job to make this call, so I've made it. Continuing to prosecute the case is unhelpful, and escalating like you've just been doing is particularly so.

I do disagree with the rule, but I fear you're having a knee-jerk reaction either to me or to any criticism of the rule and thereby missing my point, which I don't believe you've addressed at all:

If you can explain in a short, simple sentence what the broader purpose of the rule is, then do so in the rule itself. Brevity may be the soul of wit but, but I expect a higher standard than rule wittiness from HN. The https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html do this fine.

Wouldn't you rather have compliance than enforcement?

I think you might have a mistaken idea of how precise such guidelines can be. There are always border cases and exceptions. Trying to nail them down completely makes them complicated, which only generates more border cases and exceptions, not to mention the literalistic sort of objections that only consume time and generate even more objections.

That's why both the HN guidelines and that Who Is Hiring rule are written in simple language that gets the bulk of the point—the spirit of the law—across, without pretending that there isn't still room for interpretation. Readers are expected to interpret them reasonably, and in practice this works just fine. Sometimes they interpret them differently from how we do, and then we try to explain better, on a case by case basis. It's ad hoc and imprecise, which is exactly how something as messy as a large internet forum needs to operate.

No, I'm not mistaken about precision because I never brought it up. It's a strawman solely of your own construction. (I, instead, suggested a much less precise rule, prohibiting all replies/discussion.)

You're implying that the rule here is written like the guidelines, but it isn't.

The guidelines provide some kind of explanation, reasoning, or purpose adjacent to a rule.

The "try explain better, on a case by case basis" doesn't actually succeed, only the same reason, in, perhaps, a different word order.

Surely you don't need that kind of repetition of explanation of purpose for the guidelines, since it's already there to be read. Why such resistance to doing that here, too?

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