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Pointing something out about somebody's comment history is not an "attack". There are many HN users which repeatedly defend dark patterns and the nasty practic

by blub 7y ago

Pointing something out about somebody's comment history is not an "attack". There are many HN users which repeatedly defend dark patterns and the nasty practices of companies and then don't reply or ignore counter-arguments. It would seem to me that HN should be more concerned with those situations, than those that point the above out in a rather benign way.

dang 7y ago
> Pointing something out about somebody's comment history is not an "attack". That's certainly true in general. For example, if I post "Hey, I noticed that you've posted a lot about APL. Did you ever work with it professionally?", that's not a personal attack. But the pattern here was more specific than that. If you single someone out by name and insinuate bad faith in their comment history, that pattern-matches closely to the online calling-out and shaming culture. We want to avoid that culture here: its spirit is aggressive, we want HN's spirit to be collegial, and one can't have both. When we post moderation comments like I did above, we're always looking at the effect something has on the site as a whole. The call-out culture is contagious because people are so used to it elsewhere. It's perfectly natural for someone who disagrees with your view to have various comments in their history expressing that. The way to answer this is with better arguments, not by naming and shaming. If you say that your intent wasn't to shame or insinuate, I believe you, but that's only a necessary condition for posting here, not a sufficient one. If your post pattern-matches to a standard way people do that on the internet, then readers will interpret you that way (like I did above) even if you intended otherwise, and the effect on the community will be just as bad. In such cases, the burden is on the commenter to make their benign intent explicit and disambiguate from the default pattern.

by blub 7y ago

dang 7y ago

> Pointing something out about somebody's comment history is not an "attack". That's certainly true in general. For example, if I post "Hey, I noticed that you've posted a lot about APL. Did you ever work with it professionally?", that's not a personal attack. But the pattern here was more specific than that. If you single someone out by name and insinuate bad faith in their comment history, that pattern-matches closely to the online calling-out and shaming culture. We want to avoid that culture here: its spirit is aggressive, we want HN's spirit to be collegial, and one can't have both. When we post moderation comments like I did above, we're always looking at the effect something has on the site as a whole. The call-out culture is contagious because people are so used to it elsewhere. It's perfectly natural for someone who disagrees with your view to have various comments in their history expressing that. The way to answer this is with better arguments, not by naming and shaming. If you say that your intent wasn't to shame or insinuate, I believe you, but that's only a necessary condition for posting here, not a sufficient one. If your post pattern-matches to a standard way people do that on the internet, then readers will interpret you that way (like I did above) even if you intended otherwise, and the effect on the community will be just as bad. In such cases, the burden is on the commenter to make their benign intent explicit and disambiguate from the default pattern.