| I'm not really sure why being defensive would undermine someone's point. When you begin your point with something other than your point, you undermine your argument. This is true even when you say something popular. If you begin a point with “As everybody agrees, ...” You have wasted the three most precious opening words on something other than whatever it is everybody agrees is the case. don't hate the player, hate the game. I am not hating the player, if I didn’t care what people had to say I wouldn’t be suggesting ways to say it more effectively. I also don’t hate the game, in fact I am giving you strategies for playing it well. Speaking of which, here is another: Be careful with clichés like this. Their real value is as a social signal, a way of telling people “I’m hip, you’re hip, we are the same kind of person, vote for me.” They don’t actually make your point very well. In most cases, they have become so overused that people register their tone and move along without giving them much thought. If what you want is to establish that tone and encourage people to respond favourably to you and your words because of your style and tone, carry on. However, if what you want is to persuade people of your point, I suggest arguing your point more directly and eschew rhetorical tricks. I don’t know how you perceive things, but my impression is that discussion on site slike reddit are dominated by rhetorical tricks, memes, puns, and other instances where social signalling dominates discussion. Hacker News is not immune to this, but it is certainly more understated and at least attempts to prefer reasoned discussion to ad hominems and other emotional devices. JM2C, YMMV ;-) |
To the extent that my use of cliche distracted from point, I am sorry I used it. Similarly, I find meta-discussion, such as critique of the language of each others posts to be distracting from important discussion.
Finally, you should hate the game. The voting system on sites like Digg, Reddit, HN, have very serious problems, and the "rhetorical tricks" like prefacing a post with "I'll probably be downvoted for saying this..." are an unintended consequence of a poorly designed incentive system. Maybe I'm oversensitive to this sort of thing as a game developer, but it seems to me worthwhile to address an incentive system which encourages people to write suboptimal posts that use these "rhetorical tricks".
I'm not advocating for the abolition of self-moderation, karma systems, etc. -- I'm just saying that the systems in place are rudimentary and leave much to be desired.