It doesn't work to say "but they asked us to ban their site" because there's no reliable way to get that message to people.
On a side note, I think HN had a long history of non-toxic behavior but I'm starting to see a shift. It reminds me of when Reddit grew and the crowd became more and more unruly. Has the community grown quickly recently or have moderation priorities changed? Sorry I don't have any evidence lined up for this, just an anecdotal observation for now. Seems apropos to this issue in particular.
If a group of users here are disrespectful enough to attack creators for personal reasons and it's boiling over like this, that's a really bad sign.
So you do understand why one wouldn't want to deal with a significant part of the user base here given that they behave in such ways, and thus why one might want to avoid any traffic coming from here, but feel that it's not your job to deal with those users, because then their behavior would affect you? I really hope you'll reflect on that...
Unfortunately I'm at a workshop today and not free to take the hours I normally would to go over the explanation until it's clearly understandable. I only have a few minutes of break time. Perhaps it would have been better not to try in the first place, under such circumstnaces; but I'm not going to delete my GP comment now.