Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

If you can't post civilly here, please stop posting.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12119873 and marked it off-topic.

When someone engages in dehumanizing language towards a group of people and their baseless characterization is satirized for being reductive, you're saying that the problem is the irony, not the bigotry?

Obviously it's your treehouse and you have the right to set whatever rules you want, but this interpretation of civility seems tilted towards creating an echo-chamber that nurtures increasingly authoritarian views among an increasingly homogenous community.

Or is there no way to couch that opinion in such a way that it won't be considered uncivil?

Of course there's a way: just don't be snarky or personally rude.

The original comment shouldn't have played the psychopath card, but replies like what you posted are the wrong direction to take things.

Just for the record: I didn't play a "card", that was a genuine question.

I didn't want to escalate, I think the escalation was already done by the man who "jokingly" called his project the "Minority Report".

If you can't talk about pathological behavior with the appropriate words, it's getting difficult to discuss this. The commenter you booted out was showing very similar behavior btw.

Not every psychopath/sociopath (I know it's getting muddy there) is out to eat people, but they all fundamentally lack empathy and usually compensate with power, and sarcastic, deprecating snark is just that.

I don't doubt your sincerity, but sincerely dropping a lit match is still dropping a lit match. Nothing good can come of blithely invoking categories like 'psychopath' in internet arguments. Simply doing that is escalation. Of course it was only a small infraction, which is why I didn't chide you directly. The main problem with what you posted is that it implicitly invited worse.

Your comment here makes me think that you underestimate what a big deal this is. You're basically arguing, "well, they are psychopaths" about people you disagree with. You can't conduct disagreements that way on an internet forum without leaving a trail of destruction behind you, and that's enough to show that it's a wrong approach.

Any time you find yourself taking a psychiatrically diagnostic position in an internet argument, your game piece is sitting on a square from which no comments should ever emerge. That's not because your views are wrong; it's because even assuming they're 100% right, damaging the commons does more harm than posting such a comment can do good.

I'd just like to cosign your rebukes to both of us, they're very reasonable. Showing that you understand why I reacted how I did but that it wasn't productive is a totally legitimate call-out. I'm working on being a less confrontational/snarky/douchey person and rationalizing everything I do is a big impediment to that.

Sorry for the trouble, and thank you for moderating in a thoughtful and engaged way.

Thanks for posting such a nice reply.

> I'm working on being a less confrontational/snarky/douchey person and rationalizing everything I do is a big impediment to that.

Me too, and I suspect the same could be said (or should be) of nearly everyone here. It's all work in progress.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com