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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Those are great questions. But please omit the flamebait. (Edit: dvt kindly took the flamebait out—see below.)

If flames take over, only the people who enjoy flaming will remain in the debate. That's a strict loss for thread quality, which is one reason for the guideline I asked everyone to remember above: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Or, more succinctly: "Generate light, not heat"

Oh no, someone dares to question the left-authoritarian talking points. Better shut that discussion down.

I assumed the writer was posting from the opposite ideological position. But frankly, we don't care or even much look at that. When your job is to do the same thing over and over, after a few hundred thousand times you tend to see only the relevant bits in the mask.

The thing is: It's flame-bait simply because it's a sentiment that is so prevalent here. It's flame bait because there is a breed of people who lose their shit over it, and that breed is a large fraction of the visitors of this website. There is nothing remotely controversial in what dvt said. Nobody would bat an eye about it at my workplace, for example. You have to be aware of the monoculture here.

It was flamebait because it originally included "Oh is that not political either? It must be nice having the spinal rigidity of a mollusk." dvt was thoughtful enough to edit it above.

The comment is still live with positive votes, I don't think anyone is shutting anything down.

dang has called me out for degrading a conversation in the past. dang was correct then, and the comment replied to IS degrading the conversation as described. You don't have to be wrong to be expressing it poorly or unconstructively.

Or, reworded: "Please put 300 weasel words to sneak it past the Civility Detector 3000"

The GP comment can be made better simply by removing words, not adding any.

Please omit ye words of terror, lest ye inflict your verbal assassinations upon our poor fragile temperaments. Don't know of anything more scared of a little heat than a snowflake. [1]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-does-formation-of-...

It's a question of which words to remove. Information-free swipes make for a lower signal/noise ratio and cause feedback loops that rapidly escalate. The risk isn't "a little heat", it's scorched earth. The purpose is not to suppress intelligent discourse but to keep the forum from destroying itself.

Which words would you remove from Shakespeare to make his plays objectively better?

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