Comments like the one you're replying to serve an additional purpose of indicating acceptable posting standards to readers. Dang may happen to err on the side of forgiving, and imho that helps form some of the character of HN.

The idea that commenters should "make HN good because we all want it to be good" is quite positive, and that sentiment seems to be reflected here far more than banhappy reddit.

Sometimes people change. It's good to try different approaches, since one might persuade where a different one fails to persuade. For example, some people respond to arguments about rules while others respond to arguments about protecting the commons.

It's better to err on the side of patience generally, and feels more in keeping with the values of the site. There's are also judgment calls about things like who seems more likely to respond to persuasion, how much history the account has, whether it's related to previous abusive accounts, and things like that.

> Why not simply ban people who have crossed the line this badly for this long?

They'll just make another account and start over.

By explaining what the person is doing wrong, maybe Dang can help them be a more productive member of the HN community.

HN commenters represent whatever interests they wish—standing up for minorities, for example. There's no problem doing that. All people need to do is stay within the site guidelines, and most commenters do. So this is not the issue.

As for HN being "no longer salvageable" - people have been saying these things for 10 years or more. Of course it could have become true after 10 years—I don't want to be complacent. Sometimes the wolf eventually shows up. But there needs to be some evidence beyond simply repeating the things people repeat.

Right-wingers think HN is overrun by Marxists and left-wingers think it's overrun by Nazis. Both sides agree that the mods do a bad job and the site is destroying itself fast. They've been saying that for years. The decisive element here is the passions of the perceiver, not the object being perceived. That's why people's perceptions are so contradictory: what they're perceiving is an inverse of their own identifications. Usually this is based on a few data points that they overgeneralize. I've written about this a lot: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 for a summary, and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for endless descriptions of the bias at work.

Of course it doesn't follow that criticisms are invalid. We try to be open and often adjust in response. But criticisms have to rise above a certain noise level—they need to clear the "randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative" bar. When you say "Many people not in the community believe that Hacker News is no longer salvageable," it's not clear to me whether you're talking about serious critics or, say, Twitter ideologues, who have been saying that about HN since at least 2013. Most of that is driven by fashion. For example, small groups bond by snarking about, or denouncing, larger groups. That's all normal social dynamics (and internet dynamics), but I've learned the hard way that if you take those statements literally, it's crazymaking, because they're not really about what they purport to be about. That's not a reliable way to improve or, if you like, "salvage" HN.

All of which is a long way of saying that if you, or anyone, wants to discuss problems with HN, that's great, but we need specifics and links.