Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN. It just makes things even worse.
We've had to ask you about this many times in the past. If you'd make a point of reviewing the site guidelines and not backsliding like this, we'd be grateful.
We've had to ask you about this many times in the past. If you'd make a point of reviewing the site guidelines and not backsliding like this, we'd be grateful.
We're talking about a country too arrogant to adopt the metric system, meters are just too much for them. The optics of possibly using international standards is too high of a political cost because then they'd use the same thing as everyone else. The Horror! America is like an executive who insists on having their own private elevator.
I think my own comment history speaks for itself as being representative of someone who doesn't start flame wars, or whose posts otherwise make HN a worse place in general. Yet I'm often the participant whom you go out of your way to call out.
I enjoy taking what amounts to troll bait at face value, responding in kind while still attempting to add something to the conversation, and seeing where the conversation goes from there. If you have a problem with that, your problem is actually with the original trollbait or flamebait, not with me. I'm not usually the bad guy in these threads. Certainly not in this one.
Even if I hadn't though, it's your responsibility to follow the rules regardless of what others do. "But he started it!" is what I just referred to as a childish complaint. A less childish response would be to take responsibility for what one did, fix it going forward, and not plead other people's bad behavior as an excuse for your own. If we've been very unjust, other users will point it out.
We do our level best to be evenhanded, but we can't come close to seeing everything that gets posted, so you're never going to get perfect consistency from moderation here.
It always feels like the mods are harder on you than others, but that's an illusion. I'm not going out of my way to call you out; I barely recognize your username. My brain has been sandblasted into statelessness after years of doing this. If you've gotten repeated admonishments, it's because you've repeatedly broken the rules. The solution is to stop doing that, and also to stop posting bickering meta-comments, which just add noise and are of interest to no one else. If you need to express yourself about that, you're welcome to do so at hn@ycombinator.com.
> I enjoy taking what amounts to troll bait at face value, responding in kind while still attempting to add something to the conversation, and seeing where the conversation goes from there. If you have a problem with that, your problem is actually with the original trollbait or flamebait, not with me. I'm not usually the bad guy in these threads.
What you're describing is feeding trolls, which the HN guidelines (using nicer language) explicitly ask you not to do. It turns small flamewars into large ones, and the fault is with both parties. You're underestimating how much damage this does.
We all have a strong cognitive bias toward seeing the other person as "the bad guy" and ourselves as pure, or at least not-as-bad-as-him, which can be used to justify anything. Meanwhile the other guy has just the opposite view. That's how we get tedious spats. Please don't do this on HN any more.
The thing about "feeding trolls" is, troll bait is often in the eye of the beholder. I don't believe he was deliberately "trolling" in the sense of posting deliberately-inflammatory material to provoke an irrational response or lower the level of discourse. Rather, I don't doubt for a moment that he holds precisely his stated beliefs about Americans as a group, and posted them because he felt that this was a welcoming environment for such sentiments. My post wasn't an attempt to feed a troll, so much as it was a way of arguing that no, this isn't the anti-American echo chamber he thinks it is.
I agree that both our posts would have been best kept out of the thread. Thanks for your feedback in that direction (and believe me, I do recognize and respect the hard work you put in here.)