I don't have the name(s) off the top of my head, but can't you do a query of users whose account age are greater than (some threshold) but whose median comment score /amount of flagged to death comments is past some other threshold.

Mathematical quality scoring doesn’t work well for moderation of human behaviour in a community. Context matters a lot. Feelings influence people’s conduct and perception of others’ conduct a great deal. A user may get huge numbers of upvotes for comments they make about a technology or their profession, but then attract many downvotes and flags when they're commenting about politics. This is particularly true when political topics involve war or other life/death matters (which is a major reason why those kinds of topics are difficult on HN – they can bring out the worst in otherwise very positive contributors).

Sheesh. I meant that as a step 1 to get a list of suspect users, and then you read the users comments to see if they're all breaking the rules. (The same thing you'd do if you get a report of a user being "moronic" over email)

We already go further than that: we try to look at every single flagged comment, and for any that are egregious, we look further into their history and consider banning them. In this discussion, however, you’re asserting that there are many accounts that should be banned but aren’t, but you won’t name any. We can understand feeling that way, but we can only respond to concrete examples and actionable suggestions.

Plenty of users help us by emailing us about egregious accounts that they notice, and you’re most welcome to do that too. We can take action or reply to you explaining our interpretation of their activity in relation to the guidelines. We’re always happy to explain our thinking once we have a specific example to discuss.

I think that's the point though? Plenty of things not worth engaging with also aren't technically violating any rules: but wasting the brainpower on them also isn't worth it in a reliable way.

That's where an ignore system is useful.

Sure, I was just addressing the apparent dissatisfaction that some accounts remain active despite posting “moronic” comments, and pointing out that we can't moderate HN according to our judgement of someone's comments being “moronic”, we can only apply the guidelines that everyone on HN implicitly agrees to follow. (To expand on that: “moronic” will mean different things to different people depending on their worldview; whereas the guidelines and our application of them need to be defensible, regardless of the position.)

We hope that people will take the opportunity that HN offers, to be exposed to different points of view, if only because it helps you to become more knowledgeable and confident about your own positions. We understand not everyone is here for that!