¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That is exactly the point that I made. This is a website where the pretty much the only hard and fast unambiguous rules are about style and decorum. It is not hard to draw a line from “it doesn’t matter what you say so long as you say it nicely enough” to “people are nicely saying terrible things on that website.”

I’ve seen the “You can post anything on hn if you phrase it right” joke in group chats for years now, so this thread isn’t surprising to me in the least.

I’m not really sure how you and I could disagree on this. You are the admin here, this has been the worst thread you’ve ever seen, and you say that changes that would prevent this would be impossible and in major conflict with the “spirit-of-the-law” culture here. It does not seem possible to simultaneously claim “this is not the culture here” and “we would have to sacrifice the culture here to prevent this”