Generally speaking, I agree with the article. For some reason, there seems to be a widespread attitude of "meanness" on the internet (actually, perhaps that's

Generally speaking, I agree with the article. For some reason, there seems to be a widespread attitude of "meanness" on the internet (actually, perhaps that's just people in general...) I recall three years ago asking the question "What is dependent typing?" on Stack Overflow. The first commenter replied "Did you try google? wikipedia?" to which I provided a sassy retort (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9338709/what-is-dependent-typing http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9338709/what-is-dependent...). Some people seem to become quickly exasperated with what they perceive as "stupid" questions (e.g. Linus Torvalds). I don't understand why; just ignore them. On the other hand, I get exasperated with mean comments. I frequently upvote people on Hacker News that I disagree with if they have worded their stance in a nice way, and I also frequently downvote people that I agree with if I find their comment particularly rude. Some feel that rudeness is necessary in order to drive a point home (particularly in politics — lots of mudslinging), but I disagree. It would be interesting to see if any research has been done on this subject: are blunt, mean comments actually effective in certain situations?