Hey I don't mean to be a jerk, but please don't sign your name on every comment you write. Your username is right there, if I want to know who you are I can just look up a centimeter from your comment.
> You're pointless and my signature is none of your business. You're a jerk and a troll as well.
And you have poor diplomacy skills. You lashed out, called someone pointless, a jerk, and a troll. This was directed toward someone who criticized you in a neutral tone.
And you have good diplomacy skills? He's clearly flaming pointlessly about my signature. Why was my signature a big deal in the first place? Just grow the eff up and stop minding too much about trivial things. You're wasting too much energy criticizing about non-issues. Just because you write it that you don't mean to be a jerk doesn't mean you do, it's just a way to bowdlerize your harshness and attempt to sound civil while actually being pointless in your criticism, which is otherwise called trolling. Calling a spade a spade or plainspeaking is in no way undiplomatic. I just do not sugarcoat it unlike you who try to be pointlessly hypercritical.
// Contacting the mods via email to take a look at this issue.
The reason why I pointed this out to you is because the site guidelines used to have a rule against signing comments, and I was operating on that assumption. I'm frankly surprised it's not in the current version, but you can see it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160310014355/https://news.ycom...
Just CTRL + F for "sign."
More to the point, I'm sorry you feel like I was flaming/trolling you, I wasn't trying to do that. My memory of the guidelines is technically out of date, but in principle it still doesn't really make sense to me to sign your comments even if the explicit rule has been removed. If you had just done it once I wouldn't have said anything, but I looked at your comment history and noticed that you're relatively new to the community and have signed almost all of your comments.
I just figured I'd politely ask you not to do it since it is pretty redundant - your username is effectively being written twice for every comment you write, you're just adding the full last name explicitly. Sorry you felt attacked.
So it has been sustained that the criticism is pointless.
The excuse is also pretty lame. Judging by your profile, your account is new (less than 50 days old) and the Guideline you're referring to is wayback to 2016. There seems to be an inconsistency there. Whether you have older account or not, there is still a clear intention od flaming here. Using a two-year old archive of the guideline is pointless to justify your behavior. New accounts will naturally folllow the latest version of the Guidelines so again it is pointless to refer to old version of the Guidelines.
It is imprudent that you never tried to re-read the Guidelines since 2016, and that would be impossible either because any update to the site, it turned out, is properly published as a news in the front page.
So, again, the elements of trolling, flaming, pointlessness and dishonesty has been sustained.
I perceive this incident as an instance of how old users game the HN system by trolling new users using provocative behavior, virtue signalling and downvoting comments.
But I guess the problem lies in how HN fringe perceives "civility" and "diplomacy" which is at the level of a crude AI that doesn't get past beyond mere keyword bypasses and bowdlerizing techniques. Humans thinking and acting like machines.
~ Khayri R.R. Woulfe