2 ms·
Would you please stop policing the way other people think, talk, and feel? You're not the arbiter of right and wrong, intellect and folly.
by arbitrage 7y ago
Would you please stop policing the way other people think, talk, and feel? You're not the arbiter of right and wrong, intellect and folly.
- dang 7y agoWell that's for sure. What I am is responsible for the site guidelines. It's my job to ask people to follow them, and to try to prevent HN from poisoning itself, as internet forums historically have—or at least to stave that off a little longer: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20stave&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... In this case, I commented more harshly than I usually do because it's important for authors to be able to come here to contribute and not be met with garden-variety, albeit highbrow, toxicity. That makes HN strictly worse: it disincentivizes thoughtful people to participate and encourages hostility and snark. Feedback loops like that are all too easy to get going and they're an existential threat to this place. michaelfeathers has been a good HN contributor in the past, as well as a distinguished author on software topics. Who cares if his blog post was "shallow, informal"? That's what blog posts are for. If someone else has deeper and more formal knowledge of a topic, that's wonderful: it puts them in a position to teach something to the rest of us here, which is obviously in the spirit of this site. If people want to play the intellectual bully, though, they should find another place to do that.