My experience with posted rules is that it's less about people following them preemptively than having an explicit reference to point to when they don't.

HN's long-standing policy has been to fewer explicit rules, and looser rather than stricter interpretation. This particular one comes up often enough though that it's helpful to retain IMO, thanks for restoring the cut.

I've long made a practice of linking to moderator comments regarding policies when calling out deviations, as I'm sure the mods are aware, others might find that helpful. I've found it generally reduces the personal-irritation element going both ways, helps avoid derailing threads, and serves as a refresher to me on what standards apply.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832601>

Email mods instead: hn@ycombinator.com

HN, its moderation guidelines, and its moderator practices, are highly sensitive to anything verging on personal attack simply because site behaviour is so sensitive to such writing.

If that means blunting objections as "that's incorrect" rather than "you're wrong", so be it. Two decades' experience, which is a tremendous run in online forum space, is quite difficult to argue with.

(Not that I don't occasionally argue with mods over guidelines, intent, and/or effects, not necessarily on this specific rule.)

App-based limits/nudges are all but certainly the only way to see widespread adoption. But the tactic arises naturally out of both attention scarcity and the tendency for high-salience (or high-appeal) messages to be widely distributed regardless.

More problematic is when you're searching for needles in haystacks / nuggets of gold: sparse signal in high-noise environments.

Only [dead] stories can be vouched. It's still possible to vote for, or comment on, [flagged] stories.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548>