I might believe that if our one previous interaction hadn't been a case of selectively over-applying the "no gratuitous negativity" guideline before it was even announced.
(from your profile) you seem like an interesting person with a lot of experience and perspective to contribute.
So with that said: why not be specific about the selective over-application you're talking about? I couldn't find it in the comment history.
People probably won't agree with you but it would probably be helpful for them to at least know where you're coming from. It has to be better than just resigning yourself to the idea that the moderators are working in bad faith against you.
For my part, if it helps you to know this: I'm one of several people who have been leaning on the mods for literally years to add something about negativity to the guidelines. They pushed back on suggestions for a long time out of many of the exact same concerns people are voicing on this thread. It's not a sudden decision they've made.
I dispute both parts of "gratuitous negativity" wrt the sentence in question. First, it might have been snarky or disrespectful, but neither is the same as being negative. "Gratuitous" is even harder to justify, because the sentence was only the conclusion to a substantive point about the nature of Dunning-Kruger - one that at least 34 community members had considered solid enough to give an upvote. That sentence isn't going to kill the next AirBnB. At the same time, there were other comments on the same thread that were more clearly negative and more clearly gratuitous. Even though dang had even quoted one, this was the only one that got a direct reply.
To reiterate: I don't really care. I'll gladly accept my ticket for jaywalking, but not while drunk drivers are careening around on the sidewalk. I don't think there was any agenda or vendetta involved here, either. There was simple perceptual bias. This comment was singled out because of its visibility, not its content, and that's enough. It certainly puts the lie to the "no time or inclination" claim. Active policing without equally active attempts to avoid this kind of unintentional bias is effectively the same as deliberate bias.
Let's concentrate on finding and discouraging the truly toxic comments, before we start picking mild ones "at random" - because when visibility is involved it's not really random at all. It means comments that have attracted some attention will get quashed before those that everybody already realized weren't worthwhile.
