What’s interesting to me is the number of commenters here making a case of the form “use your own words; grammar and spelling are not that important; we’ll know what you mean”, and yet it’s often the case that different discussions will often contain pedants going off-topic correcting someone else’s use of language.

Re-reading the HN guidelines, each seems individually reasonable, yet collectively I’m worried that they create an environment where we can take issue with almost anyone’s comments (as per Cardinal Richelieu’s famous quote: “Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.”)

Really, all the rules can be compressed into one dictum: don’t be an arsehole. And yet the free speech absolutists will rail against the infringement upon their right to be an arsehole. So where does that leave us? Too many rules leads to suppression of even reasonable speech, while too few leads to a “flight” of reasonable speech. End result: enshitification.