Online I always try to talk about people as if the person I'm talking about would read it. It's always easy to be harsh when no one's watching, but the thing is

Online I always try to talk about people as if the person I'm talking about would read it. It's always easy to be harsh when no one's watching, but the thing is that online you never know if they are. This doesn't mean I don't criticize posts or people, I just do it as if that person would read it. I started doing this after some of my weblog posts (mostly about programming) ended up on Reddit and HN, and I read some of the comments on that. Some actual quotes (mostly from Reddit's /r/programming): “moron”, “idiot”, “retard”, “you must have an IQ lower than 65”, “fucking suck at making software (and I guess generally anything)”, “you’re like the anti-vaxxer of front-end development”, “this is hate speech” (context was about a technical topic they disagreed with, no politics at all involved). And there's more ways to be unfriendly than using "bad words" like "idiot", such as not actually reading the post before commenting (frustratingly common), being excessively pedantic, very aggressive but without actually using insults, etc. I remember one guy who for some reason really had it in for me and did a line-by-line "rebuttal" on several posts, picking on the tiniest thing, resulting in some comments that were longer than the article article than he was responding to, but usually never really addressing the core point. Odd person shrug. HN has been a bit better overall, though not perfect either.