Thank you for clarifying. I think your stance is a reasonable one, and (although I maintain that your initial comment was a poor vehicle for conveying them) I am largely sympathetic to your frustrations. Knowing that your initial comment came from a place of frustration also helps to recontextualize it, which in turn helps to look past some of the rougher wording.

Having said that: while I can't claim to speak for the mods or the admins of LW, or what they want to accomplish with the site and larger community surrounding it, I think that I personally would like to offer some further pushback. In particular, I think that there is a tension between what you term "making the vibes a little less weird", and something that I might term "being able to visibly, publicly care about things most people haven't thought about".

There is an argument, perhaps, to be had about whether the Petrov Day game is something "worth" caring about, even for a group of people with a history of caring about strange things. As I wrote in a separate comment response, I don't necessarily have a strong opinion about this. I am less involved in the "rationalist community" than many members of this site; I have not attended any LW meetups in person, have not interfaced IRL with any outstanding members of the rationalist community, and am not particularly involved in the inner circles of either the rationalist or the EA community. (Needless to say, I do not possess the launch codes for either site.)

So as far as the "community" is concerned, and the ability of its members to coordinate with themselves, I am less directly impacted than many here. Insofar as I would like the community to be able to coordinate with itself better, it is purely in the abstract—because I believe that coordination is an important resource, and communities with more of it do better in the long run. Insofar as I believe that coordination is an important resource, it's unclear to me whether the Petrov Day game is actually useful in enhancing coordination; that would depend on many specifics, some of which I am not privy to.

However, what is clear enough to me is that there are a substantial fraction of LWers who do take the game seriously, or at least seriously enough to post comments like these:

Attention LessWrong - I am a chosen user of EA Forum and I have the codes needed to destroy LessWrong. I hereby make a no first use pledge and I will not enter my codes for any reason, even if asked to do so. I also hereby pledge to second strike - if the EA Forum is taken down, I will retaliate. [...]

Regarding your second strike pledge: it would of course be wildly disingenuous to remember Petrov's action, which was not jumping to retaliation, by doing the opposite and jumping to retaliation. I believe you know this, and would guess that if in fact one of the sites went down, you'd do nothing but instead later post about your moral choice of not retaliating. [...]

I had one of the EA Forum's launch codes, but I decided to permanently delete it as an arms-reduction measure. I no longer have access to my launch code, though I admit that I cannot convincingly demonstrate this.

Independently of whether I personally put any stock in this game, I strongly approve of the ability of users to do things like this—to act in ways that treat this game with far more seriousness than the objective consequences it has, to speak and behave the same way they would if the game actually had far more serious consequences—and, moreover, to be able to do so without being concerned about any "weird vibes" they may or may not be putting out in the process.

Caring about things is hard. Caring about things publicly, in a space where you can be judged for it, is more than hard: it's uncool. There is, by default, an omnipresent pressure in social spaces to conform; and since caring is uncool, people who acquiesce to such pressures will often end up caring less.

I think this is VERY BAD. As such I am EXTREMELY STRONGLY OPPOSED to any attempts to increase this pressure in spaces that are lucky enough to have (relatively) little of it to begin with; especially attempts that use rude and inflammatory language as a social hammer to increase their force. In other words, I am extremely wary of the (often invisible) incentives behind sentences like this,

These present core LWers risk severely underestimating how off-putting this stuff is. How many people would be interested in participating in this community, constructively, if the vibes were a little less weird. [...]

I have to abandon my identification as an LW rat, because I just don't want to be associated with it anymore.

and downright allergic to the blatantly visible incentives behind sentences like this:

Calling a website going down for a bit "destruction of real value" is technically true, but connotationally just so over the top. A website going down is just not that big a deal. I'm sorry, but it's not. Go outside or something. It will make you feel good, I promise.

Sentences like these pressure those who read them to reshape themselves to be less unusual, and insofar as "usual" is net-negative, that corresponding pressure is also net-negative. I would like to decrease the magnitude of said pressure, and as such I will continue to push back if and when I see it.