> If you're on the anonymous on the internet, you should have some thick skin, and no community should cave in to accommodate the whims of a few sensitive users who want the entire internet be a sterilized comfort zone for them.

Some communities should be for users with thick skin, but there should be other communities (like BlueSky) for sensitive users. Users with thick skin are themselves a minority, so if only former existed, most people wouldn’t participate (or realistically, would create latter).

> Same with HN. See how often green users get berated for having opinions that don't conform to the group think.

HN’s (strong) echo chamber is more because of its older users than moderators. To clarify, moderators don’t entirely shape their community; dang seems to be lenient in his direct moderation (I’ve only seen him directly respond to obvious flamebait and personal attacks), so the users with reputation have more influence here.

I agree that users are downvoted and berated for expressing opinions against the groupthink, and I’d really like to see HN not hide user-flagged comments unless a moderator manually confirms that they break a specific rule. Although I don’t argue that HN is a perfect community, just that it’s decent and much better than Reddit: among other reasons, I still see way more contrarian, right-leaning, and occasionally high-quality comments.

> Why not "don't insult anyone" or "everyone is free to insult anyone". Why make some groups immune from criticism? Are they Pius saints? The moment you create this double standard where some animals are more equal than others, you lose all arguments of objectivity.

I agree with this. “Various” was bad wording on my part; I meant a rule like “don’t insult ethnic groups” as in any ethnic group, or “don’t insult religious groups” as in any religion, or “don’t insult all men or all women”. Ideally everyone belongs to a group and none get special treatment.

But note that even these rules nobody can enforce without bias and double standards; objectivity is already lost because there’s no formal definition for “insult” (or “… group”). For example, if I say “I prefer to hang out with men” am I insulting women? “I find women more attractive” am I insulting men? If someone thinks those weren’t insults, I can call one of the groups meaner or uglier, using hasher words, and especially if I do so consistently, eventually they’ll think I am insulting. If someone thinks those were insults, I can find milder ways to say the same thing (e.g. “most of my friends are men”, “I’m heterosexual”) until they don’t notice any insult. Where would you draw the line? Ultimately you’d have to keep drawing more and more lines, even for this one rule (“don’t insult all men or all women”), because there are unfathomably many ways to slightly alter the phrasing that alter the perceived level of insult, especially factoring context. And speaking of context, you must handle implicit insults: when is an insult implicit, when is it obvious and in bad faith vs. only apparent in an unintuitive interpretation and unintentional?