&gt; <i>if that request were applied equally whenever HN users were uncivil</i><p>That&#x27;s asking us to operate like machines—supermachines, in fact, with incivility detection and moderation powers. That&#x27;s unrealistic. HN users&#x27; capacity to be uncivil exceeds our capacity to ask them not to, so the latter maxes out.<p>&gt; <i>it does generally come off as defending specific users</i><p>We try hard not to play favorites. I&#x27;m biased, of course, but there&#x27;s more than one kind of bias here. People are more likely to notice us criticizing a comment they identify with than the cases that go the other way. We&#x27;re biased to notice what we dislike and assign more weight to it.<p>&gt; <i>Believing this is going to made you a worse moderator</i><p>In that case I&#x27;m a bad moderator already, because everything I&#x27;ve learned about HN is packed into what I said there.