1. Your comment didn't add any information—it was just grandiose, inflammatory claims ("extreme mental gymnastics", "farce to begin with" and "blatantly obvious")
2. Replies like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28163531 are to be expected to such comments. This is the way that discussion degrades. (That was the top reply to your comment before I downweighted it, so the effect was a lot more obvious before that.)
Ok, three issues:
3. This entire subthread is way more generic than the better parts of the discussion. That's to be expected from inflammatory comments that don't add information. Generic threads are much more predictable and much less interesting than specific ones: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
> 1. Your comment didn't add any information—it was just grandiose, inflammatory claims ("extreme mental gymnastics", "farce to begin with" and "blatantly obvious")
"Extreme metal gymnastics" was the only inflammatory claim and it was the same language used by the person I was replying to. "Farce" has no more charitable a synonym [1] and "to begin with" does not make it any more or less inflammatory. "Blatantly obvious" - really? It was. Plenty of replies agree based on the merits of the argument. This isn't a flamewar
> 2. Replies like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28163531 are to be expected to such comments. This is the way that discussion degrades. (That was the top reply to your comment before I downweighted it, so the effect was a lot more obvious before that.)
People get defensive sometimes, so what? Take the charitable interpretation. (and this is a deflection - I was asking about my comment).
"Please stop insulting... Don't act superior..." - how in the world did that get flagged!? How does this level of genuine politeness degrade the discussion?
"No one thinks you're any smarter by saying "I told you so"." - ...really? By HN snark standards thats praise.
> 3. This entire subthread is way more generic than the better parts of the discussion. That's to be expected from inflammatory comments that don't add information. Generic threads are much more predictable and much less interesting than specific ones: ...
That's a self fulfilling judgement (see above).
Worst case I'm guilty of extreme snark. Call it a coping mechanism.
That's a really bad worst case, far below the line the guidelines draw. Would you mind reviewing them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, not snark and fulmination.
> People get defensive sometimes, so what?
The problem is that it evokes worse from others and leads to a degenerative spiral, ultimately to flamewars, and in the long run to the site burning itself to a crisp. Remember that this has traditionally been the fate of internet forums and HN was started as a conscious experiment in trying to avoid that (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). Scorched earth is not interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
It's possible to learn not to provoke this kind of thing, and that's what we're asking users here to do. Of course one can't predict specifically how others will react, but one can definitely play the odds. Since the odds are roughly knowable in advance, we want users to post comments with a positive expected value, so to speak: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
> That's a really bad worst case, far below the line the guidelines draw. Would you mind reviewing them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, not snark and fulmination.
Please give me the benefit of the doubt that after a decade on HN I have read the guidelines many times and reply to the meat of my comment instead of the knee-jerk rhetoric (aka joke) at the end.
*> The problem is that it evokes worse from others and leads to a degenerative spiral, ultimately to flamewars, and in the long run to the site burning itself to a crisp.
It did enough to make the point; but in any case, what matters is not the outcome in any one particular case, but the statistical outcome in the long run.
1. Your comment didn't add any information—it was just grandiose, inflammatory claims ("extreme mental gymnastics", "farce to begin with" and "blatantly obvious")
2. Replies like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28163531 are to be expected to such comments. This is the way that discussion degrades. (That was the top reply to your comment before I downweighted it, so the effect was a lot more obvious before that.)
Ok, three issues:
3. This entire subthread is way more generic than the better parts of the discussion. That's to be expected from inflammatory comments that don't add information. Generic threads are much more predictable and much less interesting than specific ones: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....