"Snark or flamebait" as determined by tech bros that own the car?
On any given day there are 30 fresh topics getting lambasted by the terminally online nerds that populate this site but the second someone brings up Tesla-- Mods show up to enforce "civility" and pass out bans to anybody with 'wrong' opinions.
Hacker News being pointlessly negative is such a meme that people blackhole links coming from HN just to avoid the "free condescending advice", seems fitting these same reply guys can't handle the lightest of criticisms against their god-king or his ewaste cars.
We get called "the orange site" because name dropping Hacker News on social media causes a swarm of scavengers to attack you like a dead fish hitting the ocean floor.
I understand you have a difficult job making sense of the above + trying to prevent it from getting worse but genuinely this interaction leaves me feeling like getting my main account banned from HN would be a badge of honor.
If you want to make this kind of argument, you need a stronger basis than "So much worse than that, because they go online and simp for the company after doing it". I don't think it's a close call to refer to that as snark or flamebait.
> the second someone brings up Tesla-- Mods show up to enforce "civility" and pass out bans to anybody with 'wrong' opinions
This is entirely illusory. It feels that way only because you have strong feelings about $topic and are more likely to notice the moderation cases that feel wrong to you (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). In reality, the distribution is more or less random. We have zero interest in moderating Tesla topics or any $topic more than any other, and we don't care what your or anyone else's $opinion is.
Literally the only thing we care about is people posting in the intended spirit of the site: thoughtful, substantive, curious conversation, as outlined in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If you had expressed your opinion in that way, I'd never have replied; and if you had expressed the opposite opinion in the same way, I'd have replied the same way. As a matter of fact I have no clue what your opinion even is.
As for "civility" - we haven't used that word in many years and it doesn't reflect how we think about moderation.
