[davewiner]

If there was any truth to what you were saying you'd put your actual name on it, instead of creating disposable accounts.

One of the things they could do to make HN work better is to add a waiting period for new accounts.

Like buying a gun. You can't use the account for five days.

Maybe we can still have anonymity in the cases where whistle-blowers need to say something and be protected.

But hit and run comments like this one are what's poisoning this place.

[demachina]

His anonymity and the truth of his statement have absolutely no correlation, not sure why you even think there would be a correlation.

You have a tendency of making people regret they ever get in to it with you so its not suprising a lot of people would prefer anonymity when getting sucked in to these little flame fests, lest they star in your next blog post.

Marissa Mayer for example made the mistake of meeting with you and you apparently made her angry or frustrated enough she walked out. Your response, years later, is to write a one sided account of it on your blog to try to make her look bad. It was one sided because you neglected to really describe what you said or how you said it, or accept that you might have been at least partially at fault for making her want to leave.

She may have done some calculus and deduced it was a no win for her. She stays in the meeting, listens to you, keeps her mouth shut and just gets angry. Or she gets in an argument with you which would have been even worse. By walking out she probably took the option with the fewest bad consequences. The way I see it you pretty much have two noble roads you can take in life:

- You can be abrasive, stick to your guns, and deal with the fact a lot of people aren't going to like you for it. You take this road you need to grow a skin thick enough to deal with it instead of whining and demanding everyone who is mean to you back be blocked. You might not be popular but there is honor in this tack.

- You can try to be nicer to people, especially people you dont agree with, and then its OK to expect people to be nicer to you in return. Its really easy to be nice to sycophants who agree with you all the time. That's what you do on your blog and Twitter all the time. It takes character to be nice to people who disagree with you and are willing to stick to their guns.

Or you can take the ignoble road you seem to take time after time. You go out of your way to abrasive, insulting and dismissive and slag people who disagree with you. Then when people slag you back, or walk out of the room rather than get in to it with you, or don't invite you to SXSW to speak, you whine about the fact people aren't being nice to you and expect everyone whose not being nice to you to be muzzled and ostracized.

Just some constructive criticism, please think about it. You have a lot of wisdom and technical brilliance. You would go much farther if you weren't hacking everyone off all the time. Its OK to hack people off once in a while when they really deserve it, but you do it all the time often for no reason.

[davewiner]

I am nice to people. Esp people who don't start out conversations saying personal and negative things about me. With that kind of beginning I either ignore them or defend myself.

Why I think anonymity correlates with cowardice? Because it does. Some things are just not worth arguing about.

[demachina]

Exactly, unless people start off being nice, complimenting you, agreeing with you and telling you how great you are you shut them off, instantly. For as long as I've read your blog and twitter feed you simply will not have a conversation with anyone if they start out by disagreeing with you.

Your feed swings between wonderfully interesting and insightful and arrogant and galling. On a daily basis I debate whether your insights are worth having to wade through all the angst. So far I keep finding in favor of your wisdom and insight but its always close.

If you toned down the arrogant and galling parts you would be a much greater leader in the tech community, more people would listen to you, and you would probably be advancing your goal of an open web far faster than you are which would be a win win for everone. You seem to want to be a leader, but you don't want to adapt to the limitations that come with being a great leader, one that people want and like to follow.

You didn't say "anonymity correlates with cowardice". You said anonymity correlates with untruth. Those are too completely different things. Anonymity does correlate with "cowardice" thats why /. has called them anonymous cowards since the dawn of web time.

There can be a LOT of truth said under the cloak of anonymity. Do you think Bradley Manning was a "coward" and a liar for using Wikileaks to give him a shroud of anonymity when he was speaking truth to power in his way?

When dealing with a personality like yourself anyone who who criticizes you under their real name knows they are going to regret it. You are the one compelling people to speak to you anonymously because you don't accept criticism, you instantly block people rather than engage in dialog and you broadcast your grudges on your blog like you did with Marissa Mayer.

You have the luxury of being self employed, so am I. You can say whatever you want under your real name, as long as you are OK with the reputational damage yourself. People who work for other people can't if its going to explode in to a reputation damaging, and employment endangering, flame fest which is what happens to a lot of people who engage with you. Some people operate under different constraints in this world than you and you don't seem to recognize that.

Not sure why I'm still trying to engage in a dialog here. Chances are you stopped listing right after your last post. That is most definitely your style.

[879ijko]

Brilliant summary, well done sir.

[davewiner]

You misread my comment.

[demachina]

Please expand.

I quite carefully read your comment about anonymity and truth, which suddenly morphed in to anonymity and cowardice when I called you on it.

I appreciate maybe I bent your meaning a little when you said you are nice to people except when they say "personal and negative" things about you. I bent it partially based on reading your Twitter feed and blog for years and seeing how you actually deal with people there.

Quick question, do you think the stuff you said about Marissa Mayer might be considered "personal and negative" by some people? If so why is it OK for you to say personal and negative things about other people, but not vice versa.

I should apologize for generalizing. I am sure you are nice to a lot of people. A lot of people seem to have a very high regard for you. You may be very nice in real life, I have no way to gauge that.

The issue at hand here is are you nice, or at least civil, to people if they disagree with you, especially online? Judging by comments on HN, you seem to have really viscerally angered a lot of people over the years. Why do you think that is?

[davewiner]

Maybe you just misunderstood. When I said I am nice to people who are nice to me, that doesn't mean they agree with me on everything or even most things.

I have a friend who is a Republican, and has many political views that I find abhorrent. However, he's an incredible thinker and doer when it comes to technology, and a great story-teller. I totally enjoy hanging out with him. I even like talking politics with him, and he seems like it too. Debating that kind of stuff with him is more about exercising my mind than emotions.

I am unusually interested in differing opinions, most people aren't. Some even think that if you disagree with them, that you are somehow disrespecting them, they take it personally. I am not one of those people.

So you've really got it wrong Mr or Ms DeMachina.

You might want to take a look at your process, because in this case it's yielded a very incorrect result. You could never debug a program the way you've tried to understand who I am.

About Marissa Mayer, I don't know her well enough to know how she takes criticism, and I have no idea how she felt about my piece. I got no response from her, nor did I expect one.

My purpose was to share some experiences I had with acquisitions, because that's what we, in the tech blogging world, were discussing that day. I wouldn't write that piece today or next week, unless there was a big buyout in an area that interested me.

I am a blogger. This is what bloggers do. If you don't like the way I blog, my guess that you probably don't like blogging much.

Anyway I don't try to be nice all the time in my blog posts, but I also dont' go out of my way to be not-nice. I really just want to explore stuff and share what I know.

[demachina]

As an aside there is one tactic Scoble uses to deal with critics on Twitter and elsewhere. He actually retweets posts from people who are criticizing, filleting him and trolling him. It shows he has a thick skin.

Trolls WANT you to get angry. Since you do get angry nearly 100% of the time, it makes you ideal troll fodder. If you retweet criticism like Scoble does, and laugh it off, it completely neutralizes a lot of trolls.