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I get it's not personal, but the comments I'm posting aren't flamewar. I'm simply telling people they are wrong, and they don't like it. But that's a huge benef

I get it's not personal, but the comments I'm posting aren't flamewar. I'm simply telling people they are wrong, and they don't like it. But that's a huge benefit of forums like this I think, learning when you're wrong. And very often I am and I want to know why. Also, who is flagging the comments and rate limiting users? It's not you, you can't possibly be reading all this. It's users past a karma score, many having an agenda of promoting or defending their companies product. New users can't even downvote. So think about this, users with a high karma can hide, flag, and rate limit newer users. You want to give them the license of free speech only so long as they don't dare use it. You can see this censorship at work if you compare the Twitter response to Worldcoin vs the HN comments. I couldn't find any criticism at all on HN. I'm not going to email and beg for my freedom of speech. Your system lacks an enforcement mechanism, I can make account after account and so happens I have a million proxies to hand. I'll never pass the karma threshold so it's a simple fix.

dang 5y ago
The problem is, you don't get to decide whether your comments are flamewar or not. That's actually a rather objective question: it's a function of the responses your comments lead to—or more precisely, likely lead to, given what we know about internet forum dynamics. You're responsible for that, and putting the blame on other people ("I'm simply telling people they are wrong, and they don't like it") is an evasion of that responsibility. Here's an observation that may help. I've noticed that people tend greatly to underestimate the flaminess (aggressiveness, provocation) of their own comments, let's say by 10x. And they tend greatly to overestimate the amount of badness that other people do, let's say by 10x. Putting those numbers together yields a 100x distortion in how much responsibility we usually assign ourselves. That's basically the problem. Objects in the mirror are a lot closer than they appear!

dang 5y ago

The problem is, you don't get to decide whether your comments are flamewar or not. That's actually a rather objective question: it's a function of the responses your comments lead to—or more precisely, likely lead to, given what we know about internet forum dynamics. You're responsible for that, and putting the blame on other people ("I'm simply telling people they are wrong, and they don't like it") is an evasion of that responsibility. Here's an observation that may help. I've noticed that people tend greatly to underestimate the flaminess (aggressiveness, provocation) of their own comments, let's say by 10x. And they tend greatly to overestimate the amount of badness that other people do, let's say by 10x. Putting those numbers together yields a 100x distortion in how much responsibility we usually assign ourselves. That's basically the problem. Objects in the mirror are a lot closer than they appear!