It's a tradeoff. I get the intention, but in the long run this way of thinking does more harm than good. It compounds into the bureaucratic kind of discourse that tries to force people to be good, or to hide badness behind rigid rules. The heart doesn't function this way, and it's the heart that we need when relating to each other and when dealing with profound human issues like the ones in this thread.

Trying to sanitize too much ends up being bad for health. We've learned this about immune systems; I think this is similar. Each individual move to exclude dirt or kill germs is impeccable—beyond criticism, lest one be accused of favoring germs—but the endgame is sterile and leaves us vulnerable to worse ailments. Cracking down sternly on everything that is "not appropriate" and "could be offensive" is not taking us to a good place—it's making us meaner and colder, and even in many cases crueler (I'm not talking about you). Online discourse badly needs a way to get off this train. Maybe we need to risk some injury by jumping off before we crash.

I posted this article. I put it in HN's second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), so it got a random placement on HN's front page. I turned off the flags on it because it's obviously on topic for this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I've moderated the thread by banning or cajoling accounts that were breaking HN's rules, and by collapsing the places where it derailed into flamewar. I've rolled back the clock on it a couple times, too—we do that when a thread is particularly good, sort of like slowing down when you're reading a great book because you don't want it to end. These are ways to, in my view, support understanding and good feeling. From my perspective, shaming people when they make a bad joke doesn't serve love. It's more in the lineage of schoolteachers who used to rap kids' knuckles with a ruler when they didn't behave. We need better ways to learn not to hurt each other.