Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, please don't be a jerk in HN comments. If you know more than others, that's great, but the thing to do is to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn something. If you don't want to do that, not posting anything is always an option. But please don't post unsubstantive comments and especially not nasty unsubstantive comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I welcome you to go read the rest of my posts in this thread and get back to me on whether or not my posts are substantive, thanks!
Can I try my luck at persuading you a little? The reason we moderate like this is not because of morality or taste. It's because of the dynamics of a community of HN's size. The goal is simply to have a community that doesn't suck. That is in all our interests, including yours, as you're participating here.
There are other internet communities, smaller and more cohesive ones, and usually with a specific technical focus, that have a culture of shaming people for being wrong or knowing less. Arguably this can help to keep signal/noise ratio high by punishing low-quality, low-effort posts, demanding that people do their homework first, and so on. Some of these communities have functioned pretty well for many years.
But it's not an option for HN—this community is too large and incohesive. If we were to allow it, such tactics would soon spread, not in service of technical accuracy, signal/noise ratio, or anything like that, but just general douchery. Ignorant users would see knowledgeable users treating others that way and would follow the worst part of their example—not the becoming-knowledgeable part (that would require an effort!) — just the being-a-jerk part.
Then we'd see an exodus of users who don't want to be surrounded by that kind of thing. Then general douchery would comprise a higher percentage of what remained, making the next exodus even bigger. For a community like HN, this is how you get catastrophic decline.
In order to keep HN worth participating in, we have to have a culture that is on the good side of these nonlinear effects—i.e. we need interactions that raise overall quality rather than damaging it. Situations when a user posts something wrong or ignorant are a classic example. Correcting misinformation is good, but some ways of doing it harm the ecosystem while others benefit it. You have to consider not only the local (comment-to-comment) interaction but the systemic effect of such interactions as they compound.
That's why, in situations like this, we ask people who know more to share some of what they know, so others can learn. That way you're not just executing a local destroy operation on some mistake, you're helping to raise the level of knowledge of the community and the quality of the thread. These actions have systemically beneficial effects instead of toxic ones. If you (i.e. we all) do that repeatedly, you end up with a community that you actually want to be part of.