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Well. while I absolutely find these comments to be unhelpful, it's definitely not a good idea to censor comments or explicitly ban them. I'd like to think that we can filter out these comments by the community downvoting them rather than PG doing it himself. It should be a democratic process.

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HN is not a democracy, and it's not an open forum (whatever that means). It never was. If censoriousness drives users away... well, maybe that is itself a solution to a problem.

Features that make HN disproportionately less attractive to the kinds of users who vote up comments like the one upthread sound like a good idea.

While what you say is true, how many posts have you seen along the lines of "why was foo hellbanned" or "why was this post killed?" I think people would be upset if the response was because I think that they are detracting from the site.

I don't like the way hellbanning works here, but that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend that crap like the TC/Mailbox Conspiracy comes from a minority we should protect, nor do I think hellban administration is a problem that needs to be fixed first.

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