Hey you guys, please avoid getting caught in flamewars and especially please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Since this reply is to something a day old and identical to another one on an adjacent post, is this an automated post in response to the inclusion of the words “good/bad faith”?
If not and any criticism or even-surface-level inspection of how a question or statement is made, wouldn’t it be best to codify the “Yes, and…” improv rule (1) into your link (2)?
Sorry I missed this - but here's the belated but simple answer: I posted both manually, but took care to make them say the exact same thing to make it clear that I wasn't taking one person's side over the other.
I only do that in cases where it's appropriate (e.g. where both people were breaking the site guidelines to approximately the same degree), but in such cases it's convenient because it cuts out the "why me? what about the other person?" complaints which otherwise tend to be common.
Mods on HN are people, and there's one person who posts publicly and responds to emails (dang). Moderator comments are not automated AFAICT, though they do lean heavily on standard language for all manner of self-evident reasons.
Mods also tend to get overwhelmed with busy threads and we've had a few particularly contentious ones in the past couple of days (middle-east conflicts).
Most HN moderation overall is accomplished through member votes and flags, and some automated tools to up- or down-rank submissions and automatically flag or kill submissions. There are a number of other factors at play, including the flamewar detector (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40437018>, generally, posts with more comments than votes), and banned sites / userIDs. But none of those result in moderator comments to the thread.
If you have further questions, email mods with your concerns at hn@ycombinator.com. They're quite patient in explanations, which is how I know much of what I'm saying here, along with reading dang's mod comments, as I did when I found this thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html