alt Hacker News> snark and indignation
These are preference-based but you're pretending they're objective. I find _your_ comments to be full of snark and indignation more than any you respond to, but of course you won't agree. (But because you don't agree, that makes me objectively wrong, I know.)
"Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences." - someone smarter than the average HN commenter.
Replies
I’ve never seen any of the moderators here be snarky or indignant to anyone.
Do you have any specific examples of where dang or another moderator posted in that way?
Such a good quote, defending probably the last person on this Earth anyone would call "working class", including himself.
Bourdieu ?
My view is not that these things are objective—they're subject to interpretation and different people interpret differently. It's not like temperature or length where one has a thermometer or a measuring tape to determine the value.
But that doesn't mean they're arbitrary. There's such a thing as fuzzy quasi-consensus, and I can demonstrate it easily: if the moderation calls we make were not fuzzy quasi-consensuses, the community would storm the barricades and rip us a new one. There's no pastime that internet communities love better than piling on when the mods are wrong.
That doesn't mean we're always right—not by a long shot—but we're usually (maybe 70%?) in the ballpark of the median reader's interpretation—not because we're geniuses at reading the hivemind but because we've been trained to get it mostly-quasi-somewhat-ok through the sheer pain of community backlash. Operant conditioning is a hell of a drug.
So while the personal views and preferences of the mods have some effect (how could they not?), it's not the high order bit. The high order bit is the prospective community response, because we fear what happens when we get that wrong, and I assure you we have reason to fear it.
As for whether my comments are also rife with snark and indignation: I think you have a point there! And I'd be happy to discuss it further, if you want to.