[dahart]

I'm sorry you feel that way, that sounds like maybe you've had some bad experiences here and are turning pessimistic about HN. Just because it happens doesn't mean it's universally accepted. Personally I would say exactly the same thing in response to the above comment if it was talking about Linux instead of windows and had nothing substantive to support it. Yes, you can find people who agree with any insults you want to throw out, but how about we try to be the good guys instead?

Find some awesomeness here on HN -- there's a lot of that too -- and comment about it. Build something and show it off or support someone else who's built something cool. Write comments that contribute meaningfully and are positive and you will find more upvotes than you can possibly imagine, if upvotes are what you're going for. And you're right, you can find lots of upvotes (and downvotes too) by judging other people's legitimate choices without even bothering to understand them, but that doesn't make HN a better place, it doesn't help anyone learn, and it might not make you happy in the long run either, even if it's fun for you at the time.

We get to decide if this place is cool and supportive and fun to play in, or lame and thorny and dangerous to share any of your thoughts for fear someone will be an ass about it and insult your choice of tools. I choose the former, and I'm happy to spread the love and request that people refrain from trying to knock others down or engage in flame wars.

I generally upvote people who reply to me just as a way to say thanks for reading what I wrote and engaging with me. Here's one for you. I hope you'll find more peace on HN and get exposure to more of the positive side of it. There are some incredibly amazing people here, and it's true there are also some destructive forces too. I hope you can let the crap roll off and seek out more of the good stuff!

[fapjacks]

This pipe dream is what drew me to HN ten years ago. And while there are specifically rules against drawing comparisons between HN and reddit, years ago, the parallel made sense. These days, being totally honest, I find reddit to be more approachable and friendly and informative in the types of subreddits I read than HN, the vast majority of times. The reason I keep coming back to HN is for the once-in-a-blue-moon comments which blow your mind. If those comments stopped happening, or if they started happening on reddit, I'd never come back. There is absolutely a creed which is the centerline of HN, and deviation from it -- even totally reasonable, level-headed deviation -- is often punished with downvotes into invisibility. I've specifically created a Chrome browser extension to remove all point/color information from post comments -- and recently uploaded it to Github [0] -- just to keep my own voting habits from being influenced by this brutal kraken of sameness that exists on HN. My post above is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but in my experience, one of the subjects you can most find downvotes with is the classic win/*nix flamewar. Even something totally reasonable and said in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way which promotes something about Linux in a thread about Windows is annihilated. Unwanted facts and differing viewpoints are erased from existence. That's HN, even if there's some silver lining in there occasionally.

[0] https://github.com/fapjacks/antihnbs