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Comment by slumpt_ | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes snarky dismissals are appropriate. Trying to hold everything to some academic standard of discourse is implausible when we have deliberate bad actors pushing disingenuous arguments that - by this standard - must be repetitively exhaustively deconstructed time and time again.

Expecting that is how you convince a large subset of folks to never bother with said deconstruction, and ultimately let bad ideas roam free and otherwise get adopted by impressionable / gullible minds.

Snark is there to suggest the reader go do their own research.

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Actually snark works quite a bit better in academic discourse, where the communities are smaller and more cohesive. It doesn't work well in large, open internet forums like this one, where it basically just triggers an avalanche of tedious and ever-worse behavior. I'm not making a moral point—rather an empirical one about this particular type of internet environment. Here's a related explanation from a few weeks ago if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956

In a context like this, snark doesn't encourage people to "go do their own research" or save "impressionable / gullibile minds", nor is that really what people care about. (If it were, they'd expend energy doing those things in a way that might actually work.) Rather, its function is to vent one's own frustrations by translating them into concentrated language. The effect this has on community is to pollute it with fumes.

This is destructive of the ecosystem, unless one is happy with a single species, the snark, consuming all the others. Therefore we all need to find better ways of self-regulating and containing our frustrations. Then we can address other people in a way that has a chance of connecting with them.

It is unfortunate flagging censors the posts. Was interested to get more context in the thread and instead it’s hidden entirely.

Regarding the rest, I’m happy to simply disagree with you having observed this in practice in other communities. It’s not black and white.

One thing to remember about online communities is that size is by far the most important factor. Things work very differently at different orders of magnitude. If you know of a community of HN's size or greater (millions of users a month) where snarky dismissals have helpful systemic effects, I'd like to know what it is, because I don't currently believe that's possible.

As for flagging, what thread are you referring to?

What's disingenuous is assuming people who disagree with you (and who present supporting arguments) are knowingly bad actors. Actually, they're much more likely to be normal people with sincere beliefs.

And we all know that nobody is going to "go do their own research" because you snarkily disagreed with them. People do research when you make it easy for them to do, not when you drive-by insult them with an unreasonable reply. Drawing conclusions without providing reasons is literally being unreasonable.

There are billions of people with bad opinions on the internet. Nobody is forcing you to educate all of them. If you decide to try, it's predictable that you will at some point become tired of repeating yourself. At that point, you have two choices:

A) take a break

B) post crappy comments and justify it by saying you're tired

Never suggested everyone who posts shitty arguments is doing so disingenuously. Just suggesting there are many who do.

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