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Comment by jahaja | Hacker News Reader

Surely some form of social shunning is required for a healthy community? There's limits.

Maybe, but if you're going to defend the health of the community, you need to do exemplify its norms (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), not violate them, while doing so. Otherwise it seems like you're attacking for petty reasons, such as personal or ideological animosity.

It isn't easy. The mind likes to take the experience of being right as an opportunity to also vent surplus emotion or aggression. To catch oneself doing this and forego the satisfaction is not something we do instinctively. Surprisingly, though, the trivial genre of internet comments turns out to be a good place for practice (and lord knows we can all use it).

Fair enough. I disagree however that the health of a community will always fall within normal courtesy bounds.

The problem is that when people leave those bounds, they all-too-easily feel that they're doing it for principled reasons, and this is almost always false. They may not feel it, but it comes through acutely to others—especially to those on the side being attacked, who then feel entitled to react in kind. This is how we get a downward spiral. Each reacts to the shadow of the other, which appears as a kind of demon [1], and fails to see their own, and therefore feels justified and righteous. "He's causing the problem; I'm simply reacting." It's astonishing how often that comes up even in the mostly-trivial field of an internet forum.

I know these moderation comments can easily sound like "everybody please be civil and courteous", but that's not where we're coming from. Closer would be to say: be responsible for your shadow.

It's an open question how to process enough of one's shadow so that pure anger can cut like a sword in a clear way when called for. Most of us have work to do before we get there.

[1] more on 'demons' here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Thanks for a well-thought-out answer. I do reckognise that there's indeed a snowball-effect. But perhaps the shadow that's being blocked, may be blocked for a reason. I'm not a moderator of any sort, so I know that my opinions are obviously biased. I do respect the effort in objectivity.

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