[dang]

That part of your comment wasn't off-topic, but the part about "chest-beating" was, and it provoked a wildly off-topic digression. Had you followed the HN guidelines and limited your comment to its substantive and civil portion, I don't believe that would have happened.

[melling]

One little jab in the entire thread by me. Not mean spirited but an accurate description of what people do.

All in all, I thought I was quite patient and I explained why I thought we can, and should try, to have more intelligent discussions on HN. I'm afraid that I didn't convince the other guy.

"HN comments sections cannot be more than superficial"

Anyway, I'm sure the moderators will figure it out before we become TIL on Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/32m5t5/til_ew...

[dang]

I take the point, but one thing we've learned in trying to have a sizeable online forum where the values are 'civil and substantive' is how destructive the little jabs can be. If we're to have the intelligent discussion you speak of, we all need to edit our jabs. It takes discipline, and there's a cost (a certain blandness), but it's necessary. I've had to learn this the hard way, and am far from the only one.

I've often wondered why jabs, swipes and sarcasm are so corrosive on HN when anyone who knows about the history of discourse knows what a lively role they have played. Literary wit, especially, is frequently scathing—both an art and a sport. Not having an answer to that is why it took me so long to learn not to engage that way on HN.

But I think I know the answer now. It's because this community is many orders of magnitude larger than those were, and so the lowest common denominator is both much nearer and much suckier. Keeping that at bay is HN's major task, and the main purpose of the site guidelines. It makes the discourse a little more bland, but the alternative is not lively exchanges of high wit, it's YouTube comments.

[diminoten]

The point regarding literary wit is well taken, and I think it works so wonderfully in "real" literature is the difficulty and delay in responses. Folks have to be pretty vindictive to carry their gut angry response all the way through to publishing, whereas here, all I have to do is hit "reply".