But when they get it wrong, boy, do they ever get it wrong. For instance, Paul Graham personally hellbanned Maciej Ceglowski for calling Sebastian Marshall a "prolix douchebag". Maciej's comment was not a high point of Hacker News decorum and in that instance probably degraded the site slightly, but no reasonable person could have looked at 'idlewords comment record and not come to the conclusion that Maciej is someone we want on the site. Sometimes, you take the bad with the good.
There have also been times where it's apparent that there is, if not "automatic", than at least "mechanical" banning for reasons other than nasty comments. I don't know or care what the abuse mechanisms being tripped are --- I buy into the idea that in this case, obscurity is making some baseline level of security cost-effective for Graham and his team. But it's important to know that whatever mechanical process is banning people for abuse, it's imperfect.
Ultimately, I think Graham is in a bind here. A more typical forum site would enlist more community support to help police the site. Graham can't do that, because HN also runs important parts of YC's (very sensitive) applications and communications process.† I have a hard time holding this against him. Managing a sprawling forum site is a hard problem. Doing that while having the site do double-duty as the front-end for your startup seed fund system must be a nightmare.
So I'd generally say: assume good faith; don't make a production of the mistakes; but, know that the mistakes do happen, are pretty annoying, and are worth at least remarking about.
† (It's worth knowing that YC members also have some silent perks on HN, beyond the job ads).
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