This is an excellent example of a common misconception about the Web: I didn’t come to your site. You came to mine. Yes, I did. You treat it as the equivalent

This is an excellent example of a common misconception about the Web: I didn’t come to your site. You came to mine. Yes, I did. You treat it as the equivalent of coming to your house to disturb you. That is the heart of your misconception. Your site is not like your house, it's more like a ham radio frequency. You're broadcasting your thoughts and opinions at anyone who comes to listen. Not only that, you provide your listeners with a mechanism to broadcast right back on the same frequency. Yes, "listening" to your "frequency" is voluntary, but that doesn't make it any less public. If you really don't want to deal with any negative comments whatsoever, I can think of two solutions: 1) protect the site with some authentication and authorization mechanism; or 2) restrict or disallow submitting comments. Am I like this offline? Pretty much, yes. If I'm in the street and I walk by someone standing on a box and shouting at everyone, I'll probably ignore that person. However, if that person tries to call my attention by, say, yanking my sleeve, I'll talk back at them and I probably won't be very well disposed towards them. How did you yank my sleeve? By linking to your site on HN. So let's not pretend people just "stumble" on your site and start harassing you out of the blue. If you try to attract attention and you give people a way of talking back at you, then you really should be prepared to deal with what they say.