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This is a misinterpretation of my comment. If you care about being nice, then start by trying to understand what people mean when they make a comment, rather th

This is a misinterpretation of my comment. If you care about being nice, then start by trying to understand what people mean when they make a comment, rather than choosing an interpretation of the comment and responding to your own interpretation. I see this a lot on HN. Any comment has different ways to be interpreted. It’s very frustrating when someone picks, out of the many different possible interpretations, an interpretation that allows them to argue against it.

saagarjha 4y ago
I might be helpful for you to expand on what you actually meant and why you felt I misunderstood your position, because I’m not quite sure what I missed. I’d be happy to do the same for my comment: my point was that being nice is not something that really has a floor. It’s what you do to seem agreeable and pleasant. It’s also something that varies from person to person. I’m generally pretty accepting of not having enough niceness but I will still note that on the scale of how to phrase a request it’s on the ruder end, just a step up from actively demanding things from people. It doesn’t hurt to be more polite than this.
- klodolph 4y ago
  > It’s what you do to seem agreeable and pleasant. It’s also highly cultural and differs depending on context. Something which is nice in one culture or context could be outright offensive in a different culture or context. Even if you are not traveling to another country, you can be shocked by the different ideas about how people should behave if you travel. For example, someone from California could come to New York. Both are coastal, wealthy states in the US that vote Democratic. The Californian will think, “Geez, New Yorkers are so rude! They don’t say ‘hi‘ or ‘please excuse me’ or ‘thank you’.” Meanwhile, someone from New York goes to California and thinks, “Geez, Californians are so rude! They are passive aggressive, get in your way, and waste your time!” It’s really just a difference of ideas about how people should behave. New Yorkers aren’t rude, despite the reputation. Californians aren’t rude either. They just have different ideas about what “rude” means. Californians will say all sorts of nice things to you to try and make you feel comfortable. New Yorkers will help you carry your luggage up the subway stairs without saying a word. Different worlds, different ways of behaving. Any effort to moderate a forum like HN is going to run face-first into the problem of enforcing one set of standards consistently to people who are from not only both New York and California, but every other part of the world. It would be unreasonable to try and take one culture (like SF Bay area culture, since YC is based there) and enforce it on the forum, since you can’t reasonably expect everyone to be familiar with that culture’s norms. The way you solve it is by using a looser set of standards that a broader set of people can agree on, and letting comments slide even if they don’t match what is seen as polite in your own culture. Postel’s law and all that. If somebody says something like “Add [2014] to title.” you can only interpret it as “not nice” if you judge it against some specific cultural norm, like a California cultural norm. That’s not a good way to judge comments on HN, because HN gets comments from all over the world—and if you, for example, judge it from a New York cultural norm, you’d say “This person is being polite by getting to the point and not wasting my time.”
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    I think you're arguing something we already agree on. I personally found the comment to be curt, though I'm not sure I would call it rude. Still, I was more than happy to fix up the title, since I try to accept things that are below the standard of politeness I try to show others. The part I was objecting to is actually the flip side of Postel's Law, for what you should do. The comment I replied to claimed "nice is overrated". It's not, because people actually like it when you are nice to them. And because everyone has a differing scale of what they personally consider to be polite, it's good to overcompensate a bit to try to appeal to a wider audience. You can't please everyone, but you can definitely make very small actions without descending into "toxic niceness" or whatever and avoid most problems.

saagarjha 4y ago

I might be helpful for you to expand on what you actually meant and why you felt I misunderstood your position, because I’m not quite sure what I missed. I’d be happy to do the same for my comment: my point was that being nice is not something that really has a floor. It’s what you do to seem agreeable and pleasant. It’s also something that varies from person to person. I’m generally pretty accepting of not having enough niceness but I will still note that on the scale of how to phrase a request it’s on the ruder end, just a step up from actively demanding things from people. It doesn’t hurt to be more polite than this.

klodolph 4y ago
> It’s what you do to seem agreeable and pleasant. It’s also highly cultural and differs depending on context. Something which is nice in one culture or context could be outright offensive in a different culture or context. Even if you are not traveling to another country, you can be shocked by the different ideas about how people should behave if you travel. For example, someone from California could come to New York. Both are coastal, wealthy states in the US that vote Democratic. The Californian will think, “Geez, New Yorkers are so rude! They don’t say ‘hi‘ or ‘please excuse me’ or ‘thank you’.” Meanwhile, someone from New York goes to California and thinks, “Geez, Californians are so rude! They are passive aggressive, get in your way, and waste your time!” It’s really just a difference of ideas about how people should behave. New Yorkers aren’t rude, despite the reputation. Californians aren’t rude either. They just have different ideas about what “rude” means. Californians will say all sorts of nice things to you to try and make you feel comfortable. New Yorkers will help you carry your luggage up the subway stairs without saying a word. Different worlds, different ways of behaving. Any effort to moderate a forum like HN is going to run face-first into the problem of enforcing one set of standards consistently to people who are from not only both New York and California, but every other part of the world. It would be unreasonable to try and take one culture (like SF Bay area culture, since YC is based there) and enforce it on the forum, since you can’t reasonably expect everyone to be familiar with that culture’s norms. The way you solve it is by using a looser set of standards that a broader set of people can agree on, and letting comments slide even if they don’t match what is seen as polite in your own culture. Postel’s law and all that. If somebody says something like “Add [2014] to title.” you can only interpret it as “not nice” if you judge it against some specific cultural norm, like a California cultural norm. That’s not a good way to judge comments on HN, because HN gets comments from all over the world—and if you, for example, judge it from a New York cultural norm, you’d say “This person is being polite by getting to the point and not wasting my time.”
- saagarjha 4y ago
  I think you're arguing something we already agree on. I personally found the comment to be curt, though I'm not sure I would call it rude. Still, I was more than happy to fix up the title, since I try to accept things that are below the standard of politeness I try to show others. The part I was objecting to is actually the flip side of Postel's Law, for what you should do. The comment I replied to claimed "nice is overrated". It's not, because people actually like it when you are nice to them. And because everyone has a differing scale of what they personally consider to be polite, it's good to overcompensate a bit to try to appeal to a wider audience. You can't please everyone, but you can definitely make very small actions without descending into "toxic niceness" or whatever and avoid most problems.