Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nighthawk648 2406 days ago
Op gave a personal opinion about how onboarding is ‘Total bullshit’. Commenter asked for OP to not throw their personal bias as truth. It is confirmation bias. I had this one experience so all experience are this one experience. Commenter two called commenter one out saying that commenter one is completely off the mark and that op was not speaking gospel due to one sentence they wrote at the beginning.

I merely pointed out how Saying one sentence does not change the sentiment and tone of the rest of the story.

Ie; ‘In my personal experience’ does not negate preaching nor gospel talk.

Sure I may have told commenter two to stop contributing, but that is because commenter two was also violating the rules that you so eagerly linked.

Agreeing with a commenter who calls someone out on their attempts to sway others through logical fallacies like straw man etc, is not breaking the rules. There is a huge problem in modern times of manipulation and when people are trying to manipulate others it should be brought to light.

There was nothing wrong in the example I provided and that was not meant to be taken literal, so the example provided does not break the rules.

Again, what is the point of dogmatically following rules, when rules aren’t a catch all to begin with? They are guidelines to help form a better community. The rules need to be analyzed in the context of the whole, not in some isolated measures. Nor garnered through a ‘reputation’ via downvoted. I bet most people who can downvote felt attacked when a personal experience was labeled as gospel because they are the same people who often find themselves preaching.

HN would be better off without downvoted in total rather then some gatekeeping effort to put downvotes ‘in the right hands’. Honestly this is silly that my comment was even flagged.

If an apology is wanted for telling commenter two to stop contributing I will do so, but commenter two should also apologize for making others feel they cannot contribute. Arguments are fine but when you take the stance of I am right and you are wrong without any evidence or support or argument at all, you are not starting a debate you are just contributing to the wide pool of logical fallacy.

Lastly I will defer to Paul Gharam’s Hierarchy of disagreement, which btw op and commenter two failed to reach the top:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/Gr...

1 comments

Other people posting bad things doesn't make it ok to break the guidelines and certainly not to escalate into personal attack, which you did. If you feel like other comments didn't get moderation replies and should have, we're always open to looking at specific links. If you flag one, we'll probably see it—but if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com, we'll definitely see it.

It's hard to tell from what you wrote here which specific other comments you're referring to. I tried, but got confused.

If you see a bad comment that didn't get moderated, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to reading everything that gets posted to HN—there's far too much—and we usually read the threads in more of a random-access than a linear way, so a post that seems glaringly obvious to some readers may just have escaped our attention.

You've posted a lot of good comments here! I just want to acknowledge that. You have a nice way of finding something interesting in what other people have posted and replying with something interesting of your own. That's the most desirable quality in HN threads, the idea of which is to be good and fresh conversation. It's nice and surprisingly rare in this sort of exchange to look back through a user's comment history and see that.