It's only astounding because your assumptions are false. pg is nothing like a pointy-haired boss. What he is is a highly curious and lazy (in the good sense of the word) hacker who is bored by busywork. How you managed to arrive at the inverse image of that is such a feat of pathfinding that I'd be interested in the steps by which you got there.
PG gets a lot of flack on HN, some comments better-considered than others. Most of us are able to tell the difference and file the mindless attacks appropriately. We don't need you to rush to his defense, and in fact you doing so is likely counterproductive.
You've often said that you take a policy of moderating less, not more, when YC is involved. This interaction and moderation action breaks that pattern, which is harmful.
As for replying: sorry, but as I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763996, when people I'm fond of are maligned, I'm going to respond. That has nothing to do with YC, that has to do with being human. (Another recent example was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685972.)
One is ideally an unbiased, mechanical action subject to a rigid set of publicized conditions to which the comment(s) concerned are applied. So-and-so comment(s) are moderated so-and-so because they violate so-and-so in the guidelines, for example.
The other is (by your own admission) a biased, emotional, personal action subject and liable only to yourself.
The two are mutually incompatible when performed together.
Actually, though, collapsing the GP subthread was just that sort of application of the site guidelines. It's obvious (IMO) that the subthread is flamebaity and well offtopic. I reversed that decision as a courtesy to lolinder and a nod to the "moderate less when YC is involved" principle—even though it was the correct call from the unbiased/mechanical/rigid side of the ledger.
Administering and moderating Hacker News is your job, that is correct. You also admitted that the rebuttal and moderation action this all stems from was driven by personal emotions (your liking Paul Graham). Your personal emotions have nothing to do with your professional job, the two are irrelevant to each other.
It's this mixing of professional and personal that is the problem. Not performing your job consistently will draw criticism, but mixing the two will cause even more fundamental criticism as was the case here.
Personally, I think the correct way of handling this would have been one of two ways: A) Engage in moderating the thread and refrain from acting personally. Or B) Engage in the thread personally and recuse yourself from the thread professionally, asking another moderator to do the work.
It's true that we shouldn't act on each other purely out of our own emotion but that's true personally too, not just professionally.
If you try to exclude emotion from human activity, including internet moderation, it ends up running the show anyways, just more crudely and unconsciously. Better to consciously give it a place—hopefully an appropriate place.
Questions like this have come up over the years and my sense (you may disagree of course) is that the community is happier with moderators who show feeling sometimes and can be related to personally. I could be wrong about that, but if so, it should have caused large problems long before now.
So, carry on I guess? :)
But because it's pg it's different? No, it's still a bad post. There are a plethora of other reasons Twitter was a big deal. It being a "protocol" wasn't one of them.
The subtext of these "it's not even a protocol" arguments are that Paul Graham doesn't know what a protocol is, which is not a plausible argument. Why make it?
It's true that things look different on the outside, though one might add that people who routinely jump to cynical conclusions about others don't make very good Hacker News commenters.
But what made you think I know anything about neuroscience?
This is a rather presumptive conclusion. Unless, of course, you have specific knowledge corroborated by others such that this assertion is more than a trite ad hominem.
Full disclosure: I am not associated with anyone who owns, administers, or in any way runs this site.
Nor am I "white knighting for a meal ticket."