[ACow_Adonis]

I respectfully disagree.

If an account has done LITERALLY NOTHING but post recruitment ads for one company and posts in a style reminiscent of a spam or marketing bot, it is not a personal attack to point this out. It is doubly so when the content of their post was what tipped one off to the fact that they might not be what they claim to be and aren't acting in good faith.

It is pertinent information to those without the time to do further research that this account acts like a hostile actor, contributes nothing to the site, and its position and opinion should be further discounted.

Furthermore, it's highly relevant in a thread where the discussion contains observations that the company is the kind of place that is bad to work at, and spams public review sites like glassdoor with fake reviews, and now also, comment sections such as hacker news.

[dang]

Bringing in someone's history as ammunition in an argument or otherwise to discredit them ("I clicked on your account and looked at your past comment history... yikes") crosses into personal attack in a way we don't allow here. There are presumably ways of raising such concerns without impugning the other person's integrity or good faith, but the burden is on you to fully disambiguate that.

Otherwise we end up with the sort of personal sniping that simply drives people off the site, and that's neither fair nor in HN's interests. We want people to feel free to comment here about their work or workplace, because those are going to be among the things they know the most about.

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? They cover this kind of thing:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[ACow_Adonis]

Yes, I understand the guidelines.

Our area of disagreement, from my perspective, seems to be your emphasis on "assume good faith", whereas mine is on "strongest plausible interpretation". To which I would point out, with the context of the account's past posting history, the assumption of good faith is no longer the strongest plausible interpretation. Doubly so in the context of a comment thread specifically about/containing discussion of bad faith actions and hostile workplace environment stemming from said company.

Now don't get me wrong, I think it's possible for two people to reasonably disagree over this.

But I think that's it's also reasonable to point out that in an attempt to stop discussion devolving to personal attacks under such an interpretation of essentially ahistorical accounts/context, you raise the bias and de-evolution of the comments on HN to biasing towards marketing, boosters, bots, astroturfers, etc.