[yamtaddle]

Intense levels of plausibly-deniable passive aggression, and absolutely god-awful intent being treated as something better to the detriment of discourse thanks to the "assume positive intent" rule, are what I consider some of the core defining features of the HN experience.

I dunno if it does any good, but these days when I smell ill intent beneath the surface of a "just asking questions" post I just flag the bastards rather than trying to help them by answering. Responding is simply feeding trolls, and HN threads are full of that sort of thing. Argumentative jerks who are just trying to argue, while staying just civil enough that they don't get slapped down (not too quickly, anyway).

My kingdom for sigs and blocklists.

[ido]

The problem is that your figurative sense of smell may not be correct. It really is quite easy to mistake an honest question or assertion as passive aggression or sarcasm in text form.

[yamtaddle]

Maybe, but I can assure you from back when I tried to engage in good faith it's pretty damn accurate. It doesn't hurt that HN's a target-rich environment for such a detector, of course.

[ido]

I had the feeling my honest questions were not-rarely seen as sarcasms or bad faith arguments. Probably has some overlap with autistic spectrum disorders.

And I often wished I could specify “please read this comment in literally the way I wrote it and don’t try to find a non-existing message between the lines”. Alas.

[yamtaddle]

> And I often wished I could specify “please read this comment in literally the way I wrote it and don’t try to find a non-existing message between the lines”. Alas.

This is definitely a problem, and while typical on the Web more broadly, there are a few flavors of it that are more common here than other places. You have my sympathy, and I do try to be aware of my own limitations and don't just run around flag-happy for anything I might be able to read as having a bad tone. Though I'm sure I mess up sometimes.

However—there's a certain kind of needling, brash posting style that's nearly always just someone trying to tee themselves up for some usually-idiotic rant or series of needlessly-aggressive arguments they have prepared but don't yet have an entry to post without being off-topic, that's often initiated with a question that looks kinda innocent but's just a little off. That's the "smell" I mean, and it's the kind I've learned to just flag without trying to "help" (due to assuming good faith), and I'm pretty sure I have a low false-positive rate on those. This is, from what I can tell, an extremely successful approach to trolling HN (I'm quite certain a few posters do it for that express purpose, though I do think the typical motive is different and not purely aimed at creating chaos and bad feelings), and one that HN has no good defense against except cleaning it up after the fact, which is often after the whole discussion thread's mostly dead, anyway.

It's not unusual for half the posts in a thread to stem from these kinds of premeditated argument-prompts that were never intended to curiously explore the problem space (though they may, for a time, masquerade as such) and to end up acrimonious and/or in massive wheel-spinning flame wars—as there's no other way it could have gone, because the instigator was looking for a fight, even if they weren't trying to troll per se, and were relying on assume-good-faith engagement to let the embers mature into a full-blown fire so they could embark on their righteous crusade or whatever it is they think they're doing, rather than being ignored (again: for god's sake, give us user ignore-lists—that and making poster identity a little more prominent so we can more easily recognize patterns, rather than instances, of behavior would help so much and I bet those flame sub-threads would get a lot quieter) or instantly called out and told to fuck off as they might on other sites that lack strong adherence to the "assume good faith" rule.

To avoid just shitting on the site (I'm not here because I hate it... though I do think some parodies and unkind criticisms of HN are closer to the truth, than its own collective self-image is), if I could pick out one cultural thing I really like about HN, it's the relative lack of value-free posts about obvious typos or accidental word omissions or that sort of thing. You see occasional corrections of actual usage or spelling mistakes, where the poster seems not to have slipped up but to actually have a poor idea of what's most-correct and to have done the wrong thing unknowingly, but on purpose, but those are usually polite and at least convey potentially-useful information. But, very little "did you mean X LOL?" where every single person reading it can tell that yes, they meant X, and simply made a mistake. That shit's really common on some other corners of the Web and it's just the worst. I think that quality's mainly a consequence of HN being pretty decent at policing blatantly low-value posts in general.