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by jorgearturo 4049 days ago
I've found that the most healthy way to deal with people that dismiss your entire argument/point/opinion by nit-picking your grammar (or similar) is to dismiss them back, kindly.

The kindly part is so important; their attitude shows that they don't have an open mind at the moment; dismissing kindly leaves a moral door open so that in the infrequent (but not rare) event that they'll have an open mind later in the day (or later in a lifetime), they may remember your reasoning and revisit the logic in their minds and agree with you, sometimes they acknowledge you merit for it and sometimes they don't, but when they do, bingo, you just made an intellectual ally, but that works only if you were kind and treated them with respect.

Pick your battles; If you insist on proving yourself right and antagonize people (remember even trolls are people) you make gratuitous enemies and waste resources in general; time, energy, focus, etc.

Trust me, I've turned foes into allies several times in my short lifetime. And more importantly, I've saved myself from wasting time and headaches. Kindness works miracles and saves time.

Be kind, rewind (your mind?).

And don't forget to read the welcomming page and the guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

1 comments

Those are all great points and I try to follow them myself when interacting online. I was actually looking for some kind of way to stop it from an algorithmic standpoint or some other fashion. Mainly because I don't like reading and wasting time on some minor nitpicks.
Not sure if I understood you correctly but as far as I know HN uses algorithms already for this sort of taks.

That's cool but I'd like to have better control, so I'm designing a custom HN curator myself. And I've noticed some other people have done the very same thing themselves.