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Comment by jnicholasp | Hacker News Reader

Mate, this isn't about abstract philosophical disagreements over what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia is a private platform entitled to make and enforce its own rules about what it is and how it should be used, that you've been using for years and have no excuse for not knowing the obvious basic rules of, one of which is "don't abuse wikipedia by treating it as an all-purpose host for your personal data". You have zero grounds to be pissed, and zero entitlement to the time and effort of a volunteer moderator who saw someone blatantly abusing the site's hosting generosity. Not letting you use Wikipedia's servers as your personal cloud service has absolutely nothing to do with a perceived decline in the character or culture of the site.

Make a Google doc next time.

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You seem to have completely missed the argument of the linked article. (Also, saying that something "isn't about X" doesn't magically make it not about X.)

You also seem to be mixing up what "is" with what "ought to be". Feel free to read more about this common fallacy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

It's pretty clear that you are confused about what Wikipedia is (not your personal cloud server) vs what you think it ought to be (your personal cloud server). Getting angry about your clearly-against-the-rules behavior being stopped and using that as a reason to go on a rant about Wikipedia dying of incivility is ridiculous.

Wikipedia may or may not have a problematic culture. You were still obviously in the wrong and no one owes you their time to go into a gentle negotiation about it.

I'll break this down into easy-to-understand parts for you.

> It's pretty clear that you are confused about what Wikipedia is (not your personal cloud server) vs what you think it ought to be (your personal cloud server).

Nice "clever response," but you would realize -- if you had read and comprehended my article & comments -- that I have no such confusion.

> Getting angry about your clearly-against-the-rules behavior being stopped and using that as a reason to go on a rant about Wikipedia dying of incivility is ridiculous.

"Ridiculous" is not a counterargument.

> Wikipedia may or may not have a problematic culture.

Meaningless statement. Waste of space.

> You were still obviously in the wrong

A factual restatement of what the rules are does not even come close to constituting a reply to the linked post, let alone a counterargument.

> and no one owes you their time to go into a gentle negotiation about it.

Normative statement. It's also incoherent. My position is that it is consequentially better for administrators to act otherwise. If you can't reply on consequential grounds and without making appeals to what people "should" or "shouldn't" do, then just don't reply, please.

I read your article and all of your comments, and my consequentialist argument is this: you will be a lot happier, and other people will like you more, if you learn to use rationalist thinking modes and lists of fallacies less as weapons to wield against others, and more as tools for self-examination and ways to question not only what you're thinking but why - sometimes you'll realize that you're over-reacting to a perceived insult, and justifying your angry response with a weakly related argument about why the entity that insulted you is terrible. And maybe you'll stop yourself before you do that publicly where people can see your tantrum.

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