People overestimate their own humour and wit, and underestimate the provocations they supply to others. I don't mean to pick on you personally—we all do this. But it's certainly a thing.
I'm well aware that you've been posting here for 13 years. I think that's great. Unfortunately your recent comments (say, this year at least) have been full of swipes at other users—not all of them (fortunately!), but enough that you've been doing it routinely. That's just not cool. Would you please edit those out when you post? I certainly don't want to ban you but we ban others for that kind of thing and at some point we have to apply the rules fairly.
Even if I hadn't though, it's your responsibility to follow the rules regardless of what others do. "But he started it!" is what I just referred to as a childish complaint. A less childish response would be to take responsibility for what one did, fix it going forward, and not plead other people's bad behavior as an excuse for your own. If we've been very unjust, other users will point it out.
We do our level best to be evenhanded, but we can't come close to seeing everything that gets posted, so you're never going to get perfect consistency from moderation here.
It always feels like the mods are harder on you than others, but that's an illusion. I'm not going out of my way to call you out; I barely recognize your username. My brain has been sandblasted into statelessness after years of doing this. If you've gotten repeated admonishments, it's because you've repeatedly broken the rules. The solution is to stop doing that, and also to stop posting bickering meta-comments, which just add noise and are of interest to no one else. If you need to express yourself about that, you're welcome to do so at hn@ycombinator.com.
> I enjoy taking what amounts to troll bait at face value, responding in kind while still attempting to add something to the conversation, and seeing where the conversation goes from there. If you have a problem with that, your problem is actually with the original trollbait or flamebait, not with me. I'm not usually the bad guy in these threads.
What you're describing is feeding trolls, which the HN guidelines (using nicer language) explicitly ask you not to do. It turns small flamewars into large ones, and the fault is with both parties. You're underestimating how much damage this does.
We all have a strong cognitive bias toward seeing the other person as "the bad guy" and ourselves as pure, or at least not-as-bad-as-him, which can be used to justify anything. Meanwhile the other guy has just the opposite view. That's how we get tedious spats. Please don't do this on HN any more.
Please don't patronize other users by telling them to "calm down", "don't get defensive", etc. The root cause is that your comments were casually insulting; adding further casual insults doesn't help. A much better strategy is to edit such swipes out of your comments to begin with.
Wait, what? The first link points to you doing exactly what you're now claiming is impossible: pushing back, with threats of a ban, against behavior you recognize as human nature[1]:
>Can you please make your substantive points without snark or ... sneering at the community?
>It's human nature to make ourselves feel superior by putting down others, but it skews discussion in a way that goes against what we're trying to optimize for here [link].
>Edit: it looks like you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in a lot of what you've been posting here. Can you please review them and stick to them? I don't want to ban you but we end up not having much choice if an account keeps posting in this low-quality way.
I get that moderation is hard and time-consuming. But if you're going to reply to justify your decisions at all, I'm confused at why you'd do so just to invent a standard, on the spot, that you're obviously not following. (Hence why I charitably guessed that there was some more substantive reference I might be missing.)
Would you please make your substantive points less aggressively? I appreciate that you know a great deal about this topic and we all probably have a lot to learn from you. Nonetheless you crossed the line here, and not only here—repeatedly mocking someone for their username, for example, is a cheap shot. You undermine your own arguments when you do things like this, in addition to poisoning the culture that we're trying so hard to prevent from becoming outright toxic.
Personal attacks aren't ok regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Please edit such swipes out of your comments here. We've had to ask you this more than once before.
I understand (believe me, it's in my bones) how hard it is not to lash back at people who resort to snark and swipes when they don't like what you're arguing on the internet—and how it's a thousand times harder when an impromptu mob is ganging up on you (or it feels like one is). But please don't cross the line yourself.
"Come on guy" and "people have been pointing it out to you for hours now" are rude and personal. Please make your substantive points without swipes. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I didn't see personal attacks from tptacek. Some of his comments in this thread were edgier than I would like but I didn't see any that broke the site guidelines badly enough to warrant a scolding the way your comment did. Based on what I saw, this isn't a borderline call and (in case you're worried about this) it has nothing to do with disagreeing with you—just look at my posts on the actual topic.
> Every time I see him winding people up, you're there behind him, threatening anyone who stands up
The active ingredient there is "I see". What people see, and fail to see, is basically determined by their passions on a subject. If all these years of moderation have taught me one thing, it's that.
Your comments are crossing into personal incivility. We ban accounts that do that, so please edit such bits out of your posts here, regardless of how wrong anyone else may be.
There's no need for personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't.
Cherry-picking one post from a statistical cloud and calling it typical is dodgy. Even the distribution in this thread doesn't match your description. Actually, even the comment you're picking on doesn't match your description.
I merely say this because these sort of passive-aggressive remarks are generally not tolerated here. It just doesn't make for very interesting conversation, flamewars aside.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
It's all too easy to assume that you're following the rules when you aren't—we all suffer from this, because we have our own good intentions in mind when commenting. But those intentions don't communicate themselves, and when you're arguing, your comments are likely to come across as 10x more aggressive (if not 100x!) as they felt to you. It's as if, when sparring, people land punches much harder than they think they do. You don't feel it that way, but the other person sure does—and then they land a punch back that feels (to them) like it's about equal, but feels to you like it's 10x harder—and suddenly there's a brawl in which everyone feels like the other person started the conflict and escalated it, while they themselves are merely reacting. In reality, both are doing it, and both are subject to the same cognitive bias that makes it feel like we're the innocent one and they're the guilty one.
For this reason it's super important to err on the side of scrupulously editing swipes and aggressive language out of your comments, especially on divisive topics. As the guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
That's unduly personal. Users here aren't allowed to address each other that way, first because it's uncivil, and second because arguments get stronger when such bits are edited out.
No one is ganging up on you—the examples I listed contain plenty of personal attacks. That's clearly against the site guidelines and of course we have to ban accounts that won't stop doing it, so please stop.
Crossing into personal attack is not ok and will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
If someone is wrong, the thing to do is to patiently and respectfully explain how they are wrong, without swipes, name-calling, or cheap shots. Your posts in this thread were much too aggressive. We've had to ask you not to do this more than once in the past.
I don't believe I called anyone names or sneered at the community in this thread and I think your description of me is uncharitable. The vast majority of my comments here have been positive, and I take far more abuse from this community than I give.
If you're talking about my comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28260455, that's humorous criticism of the community in a thread about criticism of the community, and every part of it is accurate. If you want tedious "tics" to call out, there's a list.
Being able to see the faults in a community and laugh at them is healthy. Far more so than the vituperative, contrarian snark this community expends on everything outside. And I'm not placing myself in a position above anyone here in doing so - I'm a part of this community so criticizing it is criticizing myself.
That said, I admit I got a bit overheated attacking what I thought was a bad comment here, let myself get too emotionally involved and made a bad situation worse, so mea culpa. Sometimes this place just makes me angry, and I resort to snark as a means of catharsis when really I should probably just step away for a while.
Since you're so interested in my activity here[1], you may notice that my very first, apparently terrible and flame-inducing post was about me pointing out that an article spelled someone's name wrong[2], modulo transliteration. Now you might argue that I was wrong, but do you really think that was such a terrible, unproductive and antagonistic post? The next mass of downvotes came when I replied sarcastically to someone who wrote that my concerns/arguments were "stupid" and not worthwhile. That provocative post towards me was, of course, not downvoted. My follow-up to my original, downvoted, post was at first well-recieved[3], but then creeped down to 1 again for some reason.
I'm not a victim by any means, and I'm sometimes an asshole. But maybe you should stop taking Karma at face value and stop believing that this community is beyond reproach. If you want to go through my history - which on this account is quite short - at least do it better.
[1] And your profile says nothing about you being a mod.
Your comments continue to be uncivil despite repeated requests to stop doing this. I almost banned your account for this, but it does seem like your comments have improved, so instead I'll just ask you to please improve them more. That means respecting the people you're talking to, even if they're wrong, instead of jabbing them.
I'm well aware that you've been posting here for 13 years. I think that's great. Unfortunately your recent comments (say, this year at least) have been full of swipes at other users—not all of them (fortunately!), but enough that you've been doing it routinely. That's just not cool. Would you please edit those out when you post? I certainly don't want to ban you but we ban others for that kind of thing and at some point we have to apply the rules fairly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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