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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

"This account" means "the account I'm currently replying to". No, of course the guidelines aren't specific that way. Not all political posts are off topic, but everyone needs to follow the site guidelines, and the rules apply more, not less, as a topic gets more divisive: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

That does not mean that every post that breaks the site guidelines gets moderated, though, for the simple reason that we don't see everything that gets posted here. There's far too much for us to read it all. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. People can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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To be clear, you can go ahead and ban whatever accounts you’d like.

This thread is currently trending on the front page, and it’s as political as this post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646686

But that thread hasn’t been flagged, nor are you going out of your way to ban posters in that thread.

But the account you replied to was mine, and you’re banning me because the Israel Palestine issue seems to be censured by Hacker News.

You can just admit that instead of hiding behind site policies and guidelines. “We won’t allow criticism of Israel.” If you want to be a cog for Israeli propaganda, that’s fine. Why hide behind site guidelines and not fess to it? It’s pretty spineless and cowardly, no?

Did you not notice that the very same Israel/Palestine article has just been on HN's front page for many hours?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645282

There were multiple submissions of the article. More explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27647873. I hope you'll notice that the truth is exactly the opposite of how you perceived this.

I banned you because you broke the site guidelines egregiously. It has zero to do with what the topic happened to be. The topic could have been type inference, Oreo cookies, chess ratings—that's not the high-order bit. What's not ok is posting in a way that destroys this place for its intended purpose. The ecosystem here is fragile. Comments like what you posted destroy it. We need to protect it. That's all that's happening here.

You're far from the only person doing that, and we try to be as fair and even-handed as we possibly can. I know we don't do it perfectly. But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27643425 was hardly a borderline call.

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