[akerl_]

I feel like this comment would be totally complete without the first 5 words, which serve to make it condescending.

Part of the goal of this community is for its participants to learn things they don’t know; the tone implied by the intro to your comment makes it seem offensive that somebody wouldn’t realize US non-profit status still allows for salaries and benefits for their staff.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

[Aeolun]

I think that to a point this is caused by the attitude in OP’s own comments. While it would be nice if it was possible to completely ignore it, I don’t think that’s realistically possible.

[akerl_]

Perhaps I’m overly optimistic. I’m also optimistic enough to believe that the comment I responded to wasn’t aiming to be condescending; the phrasing was the kind of thing that could very well have sounded jovial in speech among friends. I tend to think that’s the more common failing here: people type the way they’d speak if they were having a chat at the pub after work, and a lot of nuance burns off in the speech-to-text conversion.

In any case, the site guidelines ask us to counteract this by assuming good faith, and responding to the strongest interpretation: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[velcrovan]

Point taken.