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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

An online friendship of mine ended in part because of the other person's habit of pouncing on any excuse to bad-mouth the US and it's government and culture like it is The Evil Empire. So count me among the tired.

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As a foreigner who studied in the US, I used to find myself attacking some US actions with some American friends, while attacking senseless knee-jerk anti-Americanism back in my country... A sad, and also tiring state of affairs, without much (even partial) support on either place.

I may give out about something in my country and say how it's so much better in that other country but if someone from there is here and does the same I feel like saying it's a wonder they didn't stay there so if it's so bloody good.

So it is quite possible that you may indeed agree with that foreigner on the issue being discussed and yet wonder why s/he didn't stay home... So much for open, frank dialogues!

In my case, I have plenty of criticisms of my own of the US and tend to have foreign friends (in part because I grew up in a bicultural home). So I have certainly had conversations with foreigners where I agreed with some of their criticisms. And I have also had friends who lived in a country where the country as a whole had a negative view of the US and where the US had a negative view of their country and it wasn't some big personal issue between us. In some cases, it was treated more like an in-joke. In this particular case, my friend was so consistently critical in a very ugly way and so rabid about it that I did often feel like "If you think all Americans are pure evil simply for being born here, why on earth are you friends with me? How sick is that?"

This was an extremely good friend. I still miss them. One of the things that stops me from trying to reach out to them is that I don't know how to get past these issues. And I'm not interested in being someone's "whipping boy" for their personal bugaboo. I don't think there is anything healthy or constructive about something like that.

Meta-comment follows:

Would you have replied if comment scores were displayed?

In this specific case, I don't know.

Meta answer: Though there are certainly times that I reply these days when I would have only upvoted if comment scores showed.

I agree that this is an issue with the lack of comment scores. If I see something I strongly agree with, I'm more inclined to reply with a "Yeah I totally agree" if I don't know what the score is than if I see it already has 100 points.

For what it's worth, my original comment to which you replied has 25 points.

Thanks, though I wasn't specifically suggesting it was an issue. I was only answering the question asked of me factually and the fact is that, yes, it does change my behavior in some ways to not have comment scores visible. However, I do not feel I have sufficient information at this point in time to draw conclusions or make value judgments in terms of "this is a good thing" or "this is a bad thing" or even "this is what is good about it and this is what is bad about it". (I personally like engaging people in conversation. Although I am aware that concerns about signal-to-noise are very valid concerns, I have long been baffled by people who join discussion lists/forums and then loudly complain about people talking too much. So I am not yet ready to say, yea, verily, stating agreement in place of or in addition to upvoting is inherently a bad thing.)

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