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It's hard to see how this is anything other than arbitrarily silencing a popular opinion. I can understand things getting out of hand and becoming the proverbial "two minutes of hate" may be worth quashing but it is frankly offensive to have my honest account of leaving Mozilla represented as contributing to "mob dynamics."

This genuinely makes me think less of HN.

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>It's hard to see how this is anything other than arbitrarily silencing a popular opinion

I mean, I've seen what Reddit turned into (it was always there, but I saw it spread outside of the meme subs). I saw how 4chan started. I saw how Twitter started and somehow managed to keep lowering the bar.

People chastised "tone policing" in the 00's and I was a part of that. But I've seen enough trainwrecks in real time to accept it as a necessary step to stop history from repeating itself and lowering the quality of the discussion.

And honestly, it's never necessary: Does calling someone an idiot really advance the conversation in a way that a detailed criticism of the subject wouldn't?

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