[dang]

I believe you about your intent, but intent doesn't communicate itself—particularly not in tiny textblobs where tone of voice, body language, and so on, aren't available. Intent has to be supplied along with your message in a way that people can perceive, and the burden is on you (i.e. the commenter) to disambiguate it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

People's posts often generate effects that they didn't have in mind when they were posting. For the health of an internet forum, effects (which are observable) matter more than intent (which is not). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The language you used in the last sentence of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44225270 was so garish, violent, and personal that it counts as aggressive, whether you were feeling aggressive or not when you posted it. That was way beyond just "speaking directly".

It's common (in fact we all do it) to underestimate the provocation level in one's own posts and overestimate it in others'. That leads to quite a skew in perception. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(Btw, I apologize for linking so much to lists of my own past comments. It's annoying and embarrassing. But it's the only efficient way I know of to provide additional explanation, and additional explanation is often necessary.)