That question does comes up quite a bit. We can answer it by rephrasing the question. I would put it this way: "is it ok to be wrong on HN"? The key change is to replace charged words like "lies" and "deceit" with the neutral word "wrong".

People do lie and deceive, but to tell that apart from just-plain-wrongness requires knowing someone's intent, and this is not something that moderators (or readers in general) can do. Even courts of law have a hard time doing that! HN comments don't contain nearly enough information to decide it. You would have to have a mind reader [1].

Worse, readers are all too quick to assume lies, deceit, etc., in other commenters that they happen to dislike or disagree with. The internet is rife with this, as we all know. Most of these insinuations are imaginary—that is, we are much too quick to attribute disingenuousness to the other side. One can easily see this by looking at how the same accusations are made against one's own side.

Once the question has been transformed in this way, it answers itself: of course it's ok to be wrong on HN. How could it not be? Most of us are wrong about most things. Moreover, being wrong is part of eventually getting something right. Curious conversation, which HN exists for, often involves mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes (or seeming mistakes) turn out to be the most creative.

Even if we decided it was not ok to be wrong, how would we enforce that? We don't have a truth meter [2].

As we have neither a mind reader nor a truth meter, we can't base moderation on anything that requires knowing people's intent or knowing the truth about everything. We need criteria that can be decided from people's observable behavior on the site. As I sometimes put it, we can only moderate by effects [3].

That's why HN's guidelines are they way they are (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - there's nothing in there which requires us to know what someone's intent is, nor whether they are right or wrong on a topic. At least I hope there isn't!

What about the truth, then? Do we care about that at all? Of course we do! But working out what's true vs. what false is the province of the community, not the mods. It's the commenters' job to do that, e.g. by answering bad arguments with better ones and false information with true. And they should do this within the site guidelines, e.g. by being respectful and curious rather than aggressive and accusatory.

The moderators' job is to hold the container for this or (if you like) to keep the playing field as fair as possible. This isn't possible in any complete way - there are far too many factors pushing things into messy, unsatisfying places. But we do what we can.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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