One difficulty when trying to ban ideas on social networks is that it's the edge cases that matter most, but bans are enforced by low-level employees… - Paul Graham

One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to be in a position of power. That makes him seem like a judge. If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. The author of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair.

It's a rough combination when people are simultaneously overreaching and uninformed. They want the best of everything, but they don't know what the best is, so their demands are simultaneously strident and random, like a set of vectors with large magnitudes and random directions.

One of the most consistent mistakes I made when I was younger was to spend my time learning about things that other people thought were interesting — things that were cool or prestigious — instead of trusting my own curiosity.