[adventured]

> Edit: shocked (not shocked) you were an early COVID vaccine skeptic, justified your belief with poor interpretation of statistics, and now that a huge amount of data have validated initial findings, you have instead decided to double down on your original gut feel!

I won't defend the comment author's (apparent) anti-vaccine stance.

However, it's almost universally frowned upon to dig into HN users archives and lambaste them for things they've said in the past. That has been the case here for essentially the entire time HN has existed.

It's properly considered borderline cruel/mean and is entirely unnecessary. If there is something worth debating about what they said in their present comment, that should very obviously be the point of focus in the discussion.

In late 2018 some guy on here basically told me I was an idiot and had no idea about investing for predicting that Facebook's stock was a good investment after the irrational drop it had suffered at the time. I was right, they were wrong to an almost humiliating degree. Now, if I go dig up that post and follow that user around HN torturing them with their past comment/s, it would be considered to be in extremely bad taste in HN-etiquette. And I think it's easy to understand why: given the volume of comments and the long archives, HN would rapidly implode into just about the worst pile of garbage on the Internet if everyone went around hitting everyone else for things they said in the past, focus would shift to weaponizing the archives to attack users based on past comments (which would chill discussion dramatically and poison the well).

[xadhominemx]

I’m very happy to lambast vaccine truthers, and it’s good for the discourse to point out that individuals making incorrect vaccine skeptic comments were also making incorrect vaccine skeptic comments in the past.