Please don't respond to a bad comment with another one. That just makes the thread worse. Doubly so for personal attacks, which are a bannable offence on HN.
What was so bad about my comment? Saying that I don’t support Mozilla/Firefox or just not being anti-Google enough?
Also, the guy that you’re responding to simply said that I seemed angry. How is that a personal attack? Somebody else responded that I’m ruining the Internet and somehow that’s not flagged?
"You seem very upset", "I suggest going for a walk", "Take a couple deep breaths", "Calm down", and even "It's just a browser" are patronizing personal comments that cross into insulting. Even worse, "By the way, what sites do you work on? I'd like to make sure to avoid them." is an ugly personal attack. I'm delighted that you didn't take offense at any of that, but that puts you above the 99th percentile of non-offense-taking. We can't pitch moderation at that level!
I wish it were obvious, but no, we don't care (I mean we really don't care) whether HN users support Mozilla or Firefox or Google or hate them. The only thing we care about [1] is whether the stories and comments on this site gratify intellectual curiosity. Most for-or-against rants of that nature don't have much curiosity in them. They're more like sports fans yelling at each other. That's great in its way! It's something to do. It gets juices flowing. But it's not really the kind of discussion we're going for here. By the way, although I don't frequent sports fan sites, I'd bet a lot of money that users there feel like the mods are biased against their team.
To be honest, I didn't really think your comment was that bad. It broke the site guidelines by being a name-calling rant. But it was so over-the-top that to me it felt more exuberant than mean, and that's actually not the kind of thing we're trying to eliminate here. Meanness is. The reason I didn't spell this out in my reply to Shaaaaaaare is that their comment really did break the site guidelines badly, and this is much too subtle a distinction to have gone into in that context. Much better to say: even if the other comment was really bad, you still can't post like this. In other words, two wrongs don't make a right, just as mothers have always said.
