[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]

[pvg]

Yes yes, everybody should be the Dalai Lama. But I'm not.

You're just being asked not to be a jerk to people on a messageboard. It's the same thing being asked of everyone else so that we can have a decent messageboard and it's not difficult.