I mean, I heard it put this way and it has always stuck with me: every conversation here is implicitly inclusive of @dang. He’s wholly responsible for the vibes at large, and in the past several years it has become blindingly clear that he has no issues or qualms with Rusticles overtaking any thread they choose. I could write a scathing 10k word treatise on any topic with a single pithy remark about Rust in it somewhere and he’d allow the discussion to be dominated by the Rust tangent that would inevitably multiply in the comments here.

The chilling effect is as you describe, that I often feel discouraged from contributing my knowledge, experience or opinions because of the blatant manipulation of conversations by Rusticles and the apparently contentedness by dang for that to be the defining angle of discussion here.

HN should have tags. Every article gets tagged by users with high karma counts, by some sort of ranked consensus (maybe a rust tag, python tag, database tag, politics tag, etc) and users could just list tags they want muted in their settings.

Instead, I’ll be told about the HN guidelines and some minutia in this comment that is somehow worse than a thousand idiots hijacking literally every conversation about a particular topic.

As they say, not my monkey, not my circus…