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Could you please stop harassing people about their exercising freedom of speech? Does every comment need to be substantiated? Why don't you tell your government

Could you please stop harassing people about their exercising freedom of speech? Does every comment need to be substantiated? Why don't you tell your government to stop smearing Huawei?

dang 7y ago
Substantive != substantiated. It just means a comment should contain a bit more thought and information. Freedom of speech on HN is subject to the site guidelines, which are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's for much the same reason that freedom of fire is limited in national parks. If you want to comment here, you need to follow the rules the same as other users do, so please review them.
- deepVoid 7y ago
  which guideline says that a comment should be substantive? Could you please point it out?
  - dang 7y ago
    I'm surprised we don't get that question more often. The answer is that if you follow the site guidelines, your comments will automatically get more substantive. For example, if one takes the name-calling ("Musk fanboys") and weak-interpreting (of cars on the road) out of your comment upthread, there would be nothing left of it. If there's a more specific guideline we could add that would cover any patches of unsubstantiveness that we currently miss, I'd love to know about it. The HN guidelines aren't a blacklist in which anything not listed counts as fair game. It would be foolish to try to make such a list, plus how tedious—and it would only invite trolls to drive trucks through loopholes. Instead, you need to read them more as a sketch of a certain intention, and then take that intention to heart. Doing that is what makes a good HN commenter, not conforming to a contract adversarially. HN is a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law kind of place. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 from 5 years ago.

Could you please stop harassing people about their exercising freedom of speech? Does every comment need to be substantiated? Why don't you tell your government to stop smearing Huawei?

dang 7y ago

Substantive != substantiated. It just means a comment should contain a bit more thought and information. Freedom of speech on HN is subject to the site guidelines, which are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's for much the same reason that freedom of fire is limited in national parks. If you want to comment here, you need to follow the rules the same as other users do, so please review them.

deepVoid 7y ago
which guideline says that a comment should be substantive? Could you please point it out?
- dang 7y ago
  I'm surprised we don't get that question more often. The answer is that if you follow the site guidelines, your comments will automatically get more substantive. For example, if one takes the name-calling ("Musk fanboys") and weak-interpreting (of cars on the road) out of your comment upthread, there would be nothing left of it. If there's a more specific guideline we could add that would cover any patches of unsubstantiveness that we currently miss, I'd love to know about it. The HN guidelines aren't a blacklist in which anything not listed counts as fair game. It would be foolish to try to make such a list, plus how tedious—and it would only invite trolls to drive trucks through loopholes. Instead, you need to read them more as a sketch of a certain intention, and then take that intention to heart. Doing that is what makes a good HN commenter, not conforming to a contract adversarially. HN is a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law kind of place. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 from 5 years ago.