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"I'll end my participation in this convo here, though"Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but when people do this it usually strikes me as a presumptuous attempt to seize the last word in an argument. There's no need to announce that one's participation is ending; one can simply end it. I don't want to end mine, because your comments raise points that have been on my mind lately about this community.
> "the usual HN nonsense"
> "nonsense which is so prevalent here"
These fall under the trope of 'dissing the community while being part of it'. There's something unbecoming about that. It feels like a status move, a way of putting oneself above others. If you're commenting here, you're as much part of the community as anyone else is.
People post such supercilious putdowns of the community all the time and have done for years, but it has slowly dawned on me that it's a kind of vandalism—like smashing windows in a neighborhood—that subliminally communicates that no one much cares about this place. (Yes I buy the Broken Windows Theory.) Somebody needs to stand up for the opposite position: that this is a community worth making better, not a swimming pool to pee in. I guess that makes it my job to do.
I'm sure you wouldn't smash windows, pee in a pool, or throw litter out the car window, so please don't do their online forum equivalents here. (When I say 'you', I don't just mean you personally, I mean all of us in your position, which is almost everyone here, including me.)
> deserves to be smacked down
No one could agree with you more strongly than I about the badness of being shallowly dismissive of others' work, and how important it is to have a culture of resisting that. But the sad fact is, there are worse layers than that in the layer cake of incivility—and if you go around smacking others down, you're doing one of them. That's incongruent with your case that people should be more considerate of others, much as it would be to point out how someone's manners need improving by socking them.