Your comment didn't say anything about "gym and leather". But the nudge-nudge-wink-winkiness of "peculiar set of interests, and I don't mean [whatever]" was guaranteed to set some people off.

The word 'trolling' is more useful in terms of effects, not intent. (That's why I linked to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Most of the posts that troll people, in the sense of triggering them into thread derailery, aren't intentional trolling—but they might as well be, because of their effects.

The current thread is an example. You posted 10 (!) comments touching on sexuality and sexual identity in some vague insinuating way that no one understood because you didn't clarify it, and then when you predictably got a range of bewildered and/or angry responses, you fueled it by posting more of the same, acting like you had said nothing provocative and the reactions were everyone else's problem. All of this was already offtopic and then you started a whole other "I'm just asking" provocation about drag queen shows, heaven help us.

Perhaps this was all an innocent communication failure despite perfectly benign intent, but from a moderation point of view it doesn't matter, because the effects are the same as if you were deliberately trolling. As a moderator I can't observe your intent but I can observe these effects, and since what I care about (qua moderator) is the themselves, it makes sense to moderate based on what is observable.

Btw, I don't discount that your intent might have been benign, because comments depend on context. If the context is an in-person conversation between friends (i.e. people who already trust each other), slight provocations on touchy topics can just be normal playful interaction. But when you're broadcasting to thousands of people, which is what you're doing when commenting on HN, that's entirely different. You can't presuppose a high-trust audience that takes your benign intent for granted. On the contrary: you can expect a large, diverse spectrum of hearers, none of whom know you from Adam nor have any reason to trust your intent. In that context, the trollish effect of your comments was predictable. The same statement ends up having a very different meaning because of the context switch.

People sometimes get confused about this because commenting on HN feels like an intimate conversation, when in fact it's public broadcasting. If you go by that feeling, it's easy to end up playing by the wrong set of rules and then wonder why you get such harsh reactions. And of course we want HN to feel like an intimate conversation—that's one of the best things about it—but at the same time commenters need to learn how to post in a way that has good effects, not bad, and in that sense this flamewar was indeed your "fault".

Turns out the gym and leather photos are simply not there on Aphyr's twitter anymore—there were a lot of them a while ago, but apparently run-ins with Twitter moderation didn't work out in their favor, and all that's left are infrequent text posts on LGBTQ.

So yeah, quite a blunder.

By the way, it feels like the ‘fault vs responsibility’ theory might help with the moderatorial musings—but I'm having trouble finding a serious source, since Will Smith happened to say something on it. Not even sure if those are the words used for it in academy.