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Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

HN is pretty good at moderating discussions. Which is the main reason I come here. Still, I've seen plenty of beef only thinking here and I too have been guilty at times.

It can be quite frustrating when you make an observation about someone's comment only to have them automatically assume you were in disagreement. It's good to assume a generous interpretation. Since tone is so hard to gauge on the Internet, discussions quickly devolve otherwise.

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HN is now my last un-deleted social media account... and even here I end up removing 50% of my posts, and regretting another 30-odd% after realizing they were low-value emotional negative "beef" post.

Why is "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" so hard in practice? Why do I just NEED to throw in my 2 cents?!

The vast majority of people do follow that rule, but there are so many people reading these comments. If even 1% of them have a moment of weakness (or are kinda dickish personalities), they'll drown out the nice comments.

That is also true offline. Does Debbie downer ring a bell, for example?

> if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all

Because pleasantness isn't a virtue in every context? Some unpleasant things need to be done and said sometimes. In fact, saying no in certain contexts is good, though it can often be unpleasant.

That being said, some people find it pleasant to be unpleasant. Certainly self-censor if you sense that urge arising. Getting drunk on anger or righteousness isn't a good look.

Unpleasant things very rarely need to be done or said, but people (me included) are addicted to doing and saying them. We all feel the need to desperately type the first thing that pops into our head (like the sentence I just typed, and I'd argue the reply you gave). If I wasn't allowed to reply to your response for, say, 24 hours - then I might write something useful and interesting. But the internet of beefs doesn't reward that.

EDIT: FUCK! 20 minutes and I've already failed.

EDIT EDIT: Does anyone have any strategies to cope with this? I generally make sure to log out of HN (and have deleted Reddit/Twitter/Facebook etc), and my passwords are always random key-mashing that I forget so that commenting is pain... but still, if "someone is wrong on the internet" - even if it's low (or zero!) stakes... I'm compelled to type some crap back. Logically I know I shouldn't give a shit - but I do. I'm a mook! Is there an escape?!

IME removing yourself from the original emotional context of your post works wonders. Write the whole thing, sure, but then go do a context switch - go for a walk, read a different article, make some food, whatever - then once that emotional immediacy fades (which can definitely take different amounts of distracting depending on how pissed you are), read the comment out loud to yourself. Probably 90% of the time I've written something shouty I'll just end up closing the tab.

YMMV, of course, though I found the first couple of experiences of feeling like "wow, what kind of ape would draft a comment like that?" when I go for the reread were enough to emotionally incentivize me to trade time for not feeling like a big rube down the line.

Here's a strategy that might help. I mostly read HN logged-out on my lunch break. If I see something I want to comment on, I email it to myself for when I get home. Usually, by then, the urge has passed or I've realised that whatever comment I was going to make was actually dumb.

If that won't help because you can't resist the temptation to log in, I guess you could try "banning" yourself using the noprocrast setting in the HN profile?

You need to learn how to give less fu*ks. Life is too short to be wasted on internet beefs. Get a hobby, go out more. Get real friends.

> Unpleasant things very rarely need to be done or said...

There are teachers out there giving kids deserved bad grades on a regular basis. Hospital workers change bedpans. Veterinarians have to euthanize family pets.

Do you want more examples?

But, yeah, sometimes the adults in the room have to correct a misconception or ask the trolls to leave.

For tips? Consider others as more important than yourself, even when you need to do something unpleasant. You'll find that teachers, hospital staff, and vets all find ways to do that when "nice" isn't possible.

To maintain type safety, function subtypes are contravariant in the input type and covariant in the output type.

"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you expect others to accept."

Maybe human communications also has to adhere to basic principles to guarantee robustness.

> I've seen plenty of beef only thinking here and I too have been guilty at times.

Most of the beef-related discussions around here involve either Tesla, Apple vs Google (when it comes to their phones/mobile OSs), FAANGs vs the rest of the world, some futuristic AI fields (like self-driving cars) and I think that's about it. There used to be a beef between supporters of static-typing vs dynamic-typing (I personally was in the latter group), but the static-typing supporters mostly won that debate.

Other than that most of the topics on this website are pretty civilised (with a few exceptions that confirm the rule).

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