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Comment by gbanfalvi | Hacker News Reader

It covers the case when someone makes an inappropriate joke then defends themselves saying it was just a joke.

The person being inappropriate will always hide behind their intent because they can only argue about their own role in the exchange (e.g. they can't argue that the target person/group isn't really hurt).

When a conversation is derailed away from the damage caused to the intent, the harasser wins. What are you going to do? Establishing a default assumption takes that away. Always have good defaults :)

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This is largely true, but there remains the issue that there are some people who, for whatever reason, almost seem to go out of their way to assume bad intent and interpret what was said or written in the worst possible way.

There is probably some sad history behind many of those individuals, but reasonable people can disagree about how to deal with the situation.

The current fashion implies that as soon as one such person enters the community, everybody has to start metaphorically walking on tip toes.

Maybe a better outcome overall would be for the person to get therapy.

Everybody has a line somewhere for what they consider "too easily offended". This is true even for the staunchest defenders of the current fashion, because even they understand implicitly that offense can be faked.

So yeah, you need good defaults, but that's really a discussion about where exactly that line should be drawn. I doubt either extreme is the right answer.

Perhaps we can pair serial 'it was just a joke' with serial 'that's offensive' people in an infinite outrage loop and then go on with our lives?

> It covers the case when someone makes an inappropriate joke then defends themselves saying it was just a joke.

Tell them to not make these jokes here and flag their account, repeat a handful of times and kick them out if it persists despite warnings. No need to interpret intent, no ability to hide behind ignorance after several warnings.

> Always have good defaults :)

It is impossible to harass people if you just ban every new account under the assumption of guilt.

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