His complaint seems to partly center on the amount of swear words... one reason I prefer HN over other communities is we are not scared of the word fuck. Sweari

His complaint seems to partly center on the amount of swear words... one reason I prefer HN over other communities is we are not scared of the word fuck. Swearing is a part of honest society (and, luckily, gratuitous swearing is downmodded to oblivion in my experience). Why did pw0ncakes get upvoted. a) because he is probably right but b) mostly because he accurately represents his generations reaction to things like this (and, lets face it, the original post was rather silly/incindary) My suggestions (which will not be popular with many of Ycombinator’s hackers but may meet your goal of civility). And here's the problem with this entire post; it adopts the same slightly sneering, "peering down on us" tone. It's not overtly rude - but no better, really, than "fucking asshole" (once you get over the swear word). It's not, actually, a post about improving civility on HN - it's a thinly veiled attack/return shot :) Ok, I'm not going to support calling the guy and asshole (he sounds like a bit of an idjit, I think, reading through the various posts/comments etc. and the original post he made before the updates did sound a bit "asshole") and, yes, there is a slightly growing problem of attacks over fair argument here in HN comments. But this is still a stellar community; positive suggestions are good, sneering resentment, probably not :) Send me alerts when comments come in on a story I’ve written That's silly; just monitor your logs if you want to see when HN comments come up (or set up a google alert etc.). But actually I would prefer not encouraging people to come here to write about their posts unless they are already a member, reasoning: - they are probably not "up" on how things work here, and so it risks going downhill - comments here can be acerbic and honest, and people do take offense at that (which seems unfair to the writer) By all means if it benefits the discussion invite him/her in. Otherwise leave it be :)