3 ms·
Counter-arguments are great. Personal attacks are not. You can make your point better by not making it about the other person's personal failings. Notice how
by lotharbot 12y ago
Counter-arguments are great. Personal attacks are not. You can make your point better by not making it about the other person's personal failings.
Notice how I rephrased your point in my previous comment so that it wasn't about him, but was instead completely about history. It makes the point stronger.
- dragontamer 12y agoAnd you can make your points better by attacking my central point. Besides, tracker1 isn't a child. If he is feeling uncomfortable with my prose, he can talk to me directly.
- lotharbot 12y agoI don't have any reason to attack your central point (I find it mostly agreeable.) I'm not defending tracker1; I'm defending Hacker News. Personal attacks make HN worse. They are low-value phrases that sometimes drag down high-value comments. The guidelines [0] are quite explicit about this, and the current top story [1] is about trying to improve comment quality (a discussion which is, in part, related to an e-mail exchange that came in response to a personal attack directed at my wife in [2].) So, I reiterate: please don't make personal attacks on Hacker News. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html -- the paragraph with the word "shortened" in it [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585597 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8552958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8552958