Isn't HN proving the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory wrong? And showing that a decent discussion level is achievable in a anonymous environment. New Users creating their account don't even have to provide a legit email address. And at least your and my account are relatively "anonymous".
> Isn't HN proving the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory wrong?
HN employs anonymous, unaccountable, unnecessary, possibly automated and most definitely counter-productive hell bans.
And with that any level of decency becomes quite irrelevant. I implore you to turn on "show dead" and gaze upon our "shadow people", check their comment history and notice about half of them got hell banned for some rather petty reason, and are currently being made to waste hours of their time writing comments before realizing nobody reads them. The other half might have actually deserved some sort of disciplinary action, but a hellban is actually less effective than a regular one except in some quite rare situations[1].
If [the unseen mods of] HN believe that's what it takes, I'll gladly deal with some more Fuckwads. (though the more probable reason is that none of them seems to want, or is able to bugfix the modding code)