[tomhow]

Hey, can you please make your substantive points without shallow dismissals or snark? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Unfortunately you posted a few comments in this thread that have crossed that line.

If you know more than others as a professional multiplayer game developer, that's great, but in that case the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so others can learn. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but in that case please don't post. Putdowns and swipes only degrade the discussion.

[gafferongames]

Excuse me Tom, please stop with ad hominem and attack the topic not the poster.

[gafferongames]

Tom I'm afraid you're misreading the tone of my posts and their character.

I could post anything objectively true in this thread like "the sky is blue", and some idiot will post a one sentence response that in fact it's not. This idiot likes to be the last person getting snark in responding to a completely reasonable statement of fact or opinion by an expert in the space.

What I do differently is that yes, I do reply to the snark with a rebuttal. Is this rebuttal snarky? Potentially, but is it earned? Definitely.

You're moderator so let me speak to you that way. If you don't let people rebut bullshit in this comment section, you'll just end up with a bunch of uninformed discourse, where the final word is made by some idiot, who doesn't even make multiplayer games and everyone ends up thinking the sky is fucking green. This has real world consequence when future game developers try to build games on poorly made technology, which ruins game studios and people's lives.

Then again, it's hacker news, and what do a bunch of wannabe startup guys know about making games in the first place. Unskilled and unaware of it. Moderate away sir!

[dang]

You can "rebut bullshit" without being aggressive or nasty. If someone else is wrong, it's enough to provide correct information respectfully. Putting others down, or slamming their work in a hostile way, doesn't help and degrades this community badly.

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

Btw, it's quite common for commenters to underestimate the provocation in their own posts and overestimate the provocation in other people's posts. Those two factors can multiply into quite a skew in perception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). I wonder whether this might be a bit of a factor here, if you really don't see how aggressively your comments were coming across.

[gafferongames]

In my experience providing detailed information in a response in the comment section on this particular topic (game development and networking) in hacker news comments simply creates more surface area for nitpicking and arguing in response, so I keep to short responses and rebuttals.

In the future, I don't feel that writing anything more here on this topic is a worthwhile use of my time.

[ViktorRay]

But I don’t understand. Why not both? You can have a short answer and rebuttal and still be kind and nonaggressive.

[gafferongames]

[flagged]