| Hey Retra, I looked at your comment history, to see why you'd possibly be saying this. I've noticed two type of comments that you made: 1. Comments that have substantial reasoning, mostly technical but not always. These seemed to be appreciated. 2. Short comments that seemed to attack the person or a particular concept. These short comments did not have any reasoning from your side. Also, most of these comments are non-technical. My first thought was: it seems that you have a lot of technical knowledge, and people appreciate this. I know I do. Two observations on the category 2 comments you make: 1. In the comments that I skimmed, no one seemed to tell you to read the guidelines. I'll post the link [1]. Saying "then get cancer and die young" is an offensive thing to say because you're attacking the person. For some people this is obvious, but based on your comment history, I doubt whether this is obvious to you. Attacking a person is not a civil thing to do, not a nice thing to do (unless it's meant in a constructive fashion, even then it'd be debatably constructive). Regardless of that, it is in violation of the guidelines. As a technical person, I hope you'd appreciate that I'm pointing to a source appointed by Y Combinator. They make the rules on how to behave here, so then behave like that, the guidelines are reasonable. You seem to do so in most of your comments. 2. In most cases, short comments don't work quite well on Hacker News (many counter examples exist, I'm describing a trend which I observe). This is not because HN'ers dislike discussion, they dislike a discussion that does not have scientific evidence (again, a trend), most already have a problem when someone says "based on my experience". Do with this observation what you will, it's just my observation which is biased as well. I hope these two points will help you to improve your comments like these ones, because it is obvious that you have a lot of insightful things to offer. And HN would be a more fun place if we'd see more of that and less of "then get cancer and die young" type of comments. If you want a private conversation about this, you can always email me (check my profile). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html -- read the section "In Comments" |
Unfortunately, the more effort I seem to put into a post, the less effort others tend to put into reading it, so we all walk a fine line between precision and conciseness, and sometimes we end up on the wrong side. I don't take it personally.