There's a thing about text communication, like the kind you find on Hacker News and on mailing lists, and that is the difficulty of communicating with nuance or

There's a thing about text communication, like the kind you find on Hacker News and on mailing lists, and that is the difficulty of communicating with nuance or subtlety. I have learned not to try to use sarcasm, for example, because it often doesn't come across at all. I'm not specifically trying to defend anyone's "retroactive abortion" comments but, there is a stark difference between reading a comment that says you (op) should be retroactively aborted, and reading a comment that says with some subtlety and nuance that you have made a bad decision and should be ashamed of making a bad decision. The main difference? Impact. Agreed it's not a positive impact if it causes you to be totally humiliated and leave, rather than causing you to re-evaluate how you arrived at the bad choice and do better next time. But a poignant message should be making an impact, that's what makes it effective. These people are primarily responsible for writing code, they may not be skilled at nuance or subtlety in English language, and they may view exercises of those particular disciplines as significant time-wasting sinks that they've spent too much time on with too little ROI. (From experience, I know I often write too much, and say too little!)