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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The GP comment was teetering on the edge of that rule, and maybe toppled onto the wrong side. But your comment was way over from the beginning.

I'm not aware of high karma affecting how we do HN moderation. We ask people not to break the rules when we see them breaking the rules. Sometimes we reply to everyone in a thread who did that, but not always—perfect consistency isn't possible. Nor is it necessary, because someone else breaking the rules doesn't make it ok for you to break them: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Not every downvote or flag comes from reading the thread. There are also pages like https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments and https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments.

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> You think the post I replied to doesn't break (at the very least) that rule?

I'm not sure whether it did or not - quick responses (which surely we all make at least sometimes?) aren't always very carefully considered. I'm pretty sure though if challenged I would typically try and make my response to the challenge more thoughtful than my first attempt. I take it this is at least part of the point of the rule: escalation avoidance.

I had no snarky intent, but I can see my expression was (at least) ambiguous. This:

> it wouldn't occur to me however to use my own experience to make a sweeping judgement about what Google does in the large

was intended as a counter to this:

> It's pretty obvious from my ...

ie. I'm saying that what appears 'obvious' from my experience is no guide to what's actually true about the intentions & practises of an enormous and (unhelpfully) opaque organisation like Google. In my haste I didn't express that particularly well, so I'm happy to acknowledge a mea culpa on that score.

> But your comment was way over from the beginning.

Honestly bemused by this. How is the following single sentence way over the line, other than the parts I quoted (which amount to about half of it)?

    So your personal experience does nothing less than illustrate Google's
    tracking to an "obvious" degree, but my personal experience is simply 
    "making a sweeping judgement" and "confusing this with knowledge for the
    sake of my own cognitive hygiene".

It's just a simple question asking why their personal experience shows something "obvious" (their word) about Google tracking, whereas mine doesn't.

Thanks for the links to the newcomments/noobcomments

That wasn't a simple question. It was a sarcastic lashing-out. You've omitted your own punch line ("Thanks for clearing that up") in order to make it sound more neutral than it was.

The difference is that the GP was not primarily bilious and was making a point about something else, even if it crossed into personal territory slightly. Your comment was only about how pissed off you were about that. When threads get to this nasty meta place ("so your foo is nothing less than a bar while my baz is simply a bing. thanks for clearing that up"), conversation is dead. Letting downvotes and flags trigger you into adding indignant edits is another tell-tale sign.

I know that it smarts to get burned by another comment and yes, the GP should have been more thoughtful, but users here need to work on metabolizing such feelings rather than just pumping them back into the thread. Otherwise we just end up with nastiness. Anyone who wants to work on themselves in that way is welcome here, but if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

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

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