| You had 3.5k karma before beginning this experiment and you're a cofounder of a YC funded company! You're already part of the "in" group. The first comment prior to this one on your comments feed starts of with:
"Your entire comment is bullshit and it pisses me off.
You've never worked at Zynga, so to purport that you know exactly what it's like to work there is bullshit.
Your comment reflects exactly what Silicon Valley nerds think of Zynga externally. They think that Zynga is nothing but people refining skinner boxes for people to play in. You've probably seen one or two talks of Mark Pincus talking about "doing every dirty trick in the book" or something like that. Have you ever met him? Do you even know the last time he worked directly on a game? You're allowed to have whatever opinion you like, but this opinion is bullshit.
Your entire comment is ridiculously biased and unreflective of Zynga internally or externally." This part of your response is mostly a characterization of the commentator based on your own speculation about whether he's worked at Zynga or met Mark Pincus. While strictly speaking you're only characterizing the comment, this comes off as a personal attack to me. Meanwhile, other people have been hell banned for linking to wikipedia pages defending scientific facts, because those facts go against the dominant ideology on hacker news (or that of the people with their finger on the ban button.) I'm tired of hearing the refrain that reason and rationality rule the day here, when it seems pretty clear to me that if you're a liberal, an apple hater, an open source advocate who opposes property rights, you get a free pass for personal insults, but if you're none of those things, no matter how reasoned or rational you are, you risk being hellbanned. I try to restrict myself only to commenting on safe subjects for that reason. I'm actually worried that disagreeing with you will result in me getting hellbanned. That's not the kind of environment where "reasoned and rational discussion" are really going to flourish. |
My last comment isn't my greatest accomplishment. I'd hope that my behavior would be looked at in whole, instead of cherrypicked.
That being said, I was characterizing the general feeling of HN as a whole. Of the 100k+ readership of HN, very few are actual Zynga employees. So in that light, I defend my comment. There is a large anti-Zynga sentiment on HN and that sentiment is driven by media-fueled propaganda.
I can't account for why others have been hell-banned or downvoted. But from my experience being very contrarian in my own way, I haven't seen that at all. In fact, I've seen the exact opposite.