Comment by alew1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alew1 | Hacker News Reader

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I wonder if it could be done in a less grating way? I agree with the general idea of affirming the good in others' viewpoints, but I do find GP's phrasing patronizing. Why not something like:

I agree, and I think there'd be a lot of developers who feel the same way (re: wanting to help, valuing freedom of access to scientific information). I wonder, though, if there's really that much we can do as developers. There are of course some vulnerabilities that can be mitigated with good code on the server, but most attacks are impossible to prevent without the resources that a company like CloudFlare can marshal. Unfortunately, the state of the art for responding to DDoS attacks requires a big network, a lot of bandwidth, and active management.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to say "Your offer is well-intended, but of little value against the kind of bandwidth-flood-type attacks CloudFlare is very valuable against. This is because the solution to that problem is servers and bandwidth, not more devs hacking things out server-side."

But, obviously, I did not. What I've found is that, if you run light on the praise and ego-stroking, people often either view it as token and ignore it or skip past it entirely. It's a fishhook that lets you smuggle your actual points past defensive mechanisms. You have to set it deep before it's actually useful.

And then you have to wrap your point in completely unjustified uncertainty anyway, to be sure that whoever you're interacting with doesn't feel attacked. People who feel attacked generally aren't listening to, engaging with, or learning from your points.

Makes sense! I tend to take the "wrapping your point in uncertainty" approach, without all the ego-stroking. Nothing against ego-stroking; it just seems hard to make it feel genuine enough for it to work. Most comments (mine included!) contain little enough insight that any praise more intense than "good point!" or "agreed!" or "that's totally right!" feels somewhat disingenuous.

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