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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

Tweet has been deleted (URL 404s). Internet archive has some but not all of the thread https://web.archive.org/web/20190922094616/https://twitter.c...

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https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175767033360740352

I’ve seen this hatred towards HN before on Twitter and I don’t really get it. HN is one of the most polite places on the internet, including Twitter.

HN has a lot of smart people. People don't like being fact checked, especially when they believe they discovered something significant until experts show it was a basic misunderstanding.

This is the cannonical example of why HN gets it wrong. You really are not an expert in 99.99% of the topics on HN, so having this kind of holier than thou attitude is just really obnoxious.

And this is the canonical example of why Twitter gets it wrong :)

I'm not talking about myself. Never even remotely implied it.

HN is filled with the 0.1% that truly are experts on individual topics. You'll find people that wrote papers on quantum mechanics chiming in on QM discussions, people with decades of RF HW experience correcting those 5Ghz conspiracies, start-up founders jumping in on discussions, and (in this case) people that can read spec sheets and understand how systems like these are built and programmed.

No one's an expert on much, but plenty are experts on something. Twitter's often too shallow to even entertain the possibility of being wrong.

Having made (what I thought were polite) comments on Reddit only to get down-voted into oblivion, I agree that HN has one of the most thoughtful and respectful communities I've participated in.

In my experience, it's pretty easy to misjudge the expected overall level and style of politeness in a given social space. Many people were raised with the idea of politeness being a safe default, but in some spaces being too polite can come off as aloof or condescending.

There have been a number of HN threads that have become quite, er, hostile or toxic in the past. The most recent example of this would the comment thread for this article: "Richard M. Stallman resigns" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20990583)

It's good to remember that things end up on HN because random people post them here, not because their original authors want them here. HN is not, as a rule, good at keeping this in mind, and tends to treat anything that lands on HN as if it was part of a discussion they are (1) a part of and (2) welcome to participate directly in.

I think it's in fact super healthy for people to set clear boundaries about how they engage with this place, and "this Twitter thread was not posted as a solicitation for an HN thread, or for HN people to jump onto my TL" is a very sane boundary indeed.

That people read this kind of boundary drawing as "hatred" is itself a good illustration of the issue!

Archiveis link before being memoryholed: http://archivecaslytosk.onion/mtow1

Author writes:

>whitequark

‏>nonconsensually submitted to the orange website

WTF... if I remember correctly, the legality of linking (as opposed to copying content) was already established by a few court cases long ago.

I could understand if your personal site gets "HN'd", but a Twitter user doesn't pay for bandwidth.

There's a wide chasm between good manners and legality. Don't get offended when your actions offend people. At best, it's hypocritical. Said differently: the legality of complaining about people being rude is already established. It isn't even slander/libel if you weren't actually rude, because being rude isn't a crime.

It's quite simple: Whitequark deleted the thread because there is a portion of users/readers on HN that are toxic and/or hostile. People don't want to deal with that type of traffic blowing up their Twitter notification feed.

If you post something to the public internet, you cannot control where it ends up. If that is a problem for you, then you should probably not post on a non-private social media account. That doesn’t negate their right to delete their post after, of course, like this guy has done. Just can’t expect that nobody saw it or screenshotted it or whatever.

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