[philwelch]

The point isn't my tolerance or intolerance towards Mr. Ryan's statements. It's that loosely-relevant political pot-shots aren't really considered valuable comments on HN. I just thought it would be helpful to tell you why your comments weren't being received well. I'm sorry it didn't come across that way.

For what it's worth, even if it was Joe Biden, Justin Bieber, or Mark Zuckerberg who lied about running a sub-3-hour marathon, it still would have been a bad comment and I still would have made a similar response.

[nacker]

Well, it appears that other people received the comment well. I thought it was fair and relevant. However, it is tedious to read threads that have been hijacked by this kind of sniping.

[lotharbot]

Dude has a net karma score of -2. That's after all the upvotes from whoever "thought it was fair and relevant". Since upvotes are easier to come by than downvotes (not everyone can downvote), this suggests the comment wasn't received well. Because philwelch is exactly right -- it simply doesn't add to the discussion.

It may appear that people are mostly siding with you because nobody else has verbalized support for philwelch. That's because we HN veterans don't generally post "me-too" opinions, we just quietly upvote the guy who's right and downvote the guy who's wrong. In this case, I've chosen to break the silence because you seem like you might be willing to learn HN cultural norms.

Here on HN, we ask that you not take cheap shots at politicians, religions, etc. -- even those we really don't like. It makes for boring reading. Instead, make comments that other people will come away from thinking "I learned something valuable from that".

[philwelch]

Does it? It got the guy enough negative karma that he's now auto-hellbanned....