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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

> "These are typical, HN-esque responses that may get upvotes online, but they hurt personal relationships."

As a regular, I disagree completely. Comments that point out that something is wrong and have the empathy to try to help and identify a solution are much more upvoted that cynical ones that just point out that something is wrong without much caring for the other part.

If you dig up HN only paying attention to potentially toxic comments, you will find them. It doesn't make HN toxic. If you create the habit of reading yesterday's posts, giving them enough time for the best comments to be upvoted and settle at the top, you will see much much less toxicity.

It seems to me that the author is trying to get away from a certain behavior and, in the process, everywhere they look they just fit what they see in that exact behavior. Like when Woody Woodpecker is hungry.

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> If you dig up HN only paying attention to potentially toxic comments

(and the entire comment really, to the and including and especially the last sentence)

Uhm... this is the kind of response the blog post was talking about. Kind of funny, your comment, only that it isn't.

Disagreeing doesn't make something toxic.

If anything, the GP feels unpleasant for trying to present its parent comment in the worst possible light, in an overly snarky tone.

> If anything, the GP feels unpleasant for trying to present its parent comment in the worst possible light, in an overly snarky tone.

Pointing factually and patently wrong assertions is not a personal attack nor being toxic.

A comment or article does not have first-move advantage for making false claims free from negative opinions or corrections. If you make a blatantly false claim and you're called on it then that's the Hallmark of a healthy community having healthy discussions.

Do you think my comment was toxic?

Edit: if so, is there any edit you would suggest that I could explain my disagreement without being toxic?

> As a regular, I disagree completely.

Well first, you took a well-meaning article discussing how HN can be toxic. Kind of a non-debatable thing, and you debated it. You started with "disagree completely" and I know you are COMPLETELY aware that emphasizing the completeness of your disagreement is argumentative.

While I don't think your comment is TOXIC I do think it suffers from the unkind, know-it-all argumentative mentality that HN has. So as a whole, it does contribute to the toxic nature of HN.

You are basically accusing the author of "only reading the toxic parts" without you knowing whether or not they did that actually. You just assume that's what they did. Which is called a "bad faith" argument.

I meant to say that I disagree completely with the specific part that I quoted above. That those comments are upvoted. And I explain my view right after to show that I have a diametrically opposite view on that affirmation. And I don’t think that part is an opinion, it is the interpretation of a fact, for which we don’t have the data to settle the debate, so it’s up for debate, and my interpretation is different.

Later I do go on to speculate a reason why the author had such perspective. Which is just speculation on my part (that’s why I used “It seems to me”). I might be wrong in my speculation, but I don’t this is “bad faith”.

I don’t want to get drawn into a negativity thing here, but I think this is important:

> And I don’t think that part is an opinion, it is the interpretation of a fact

You’re describing an opinion here. Your interpretation is your opinion. You’re certainly entitled to it and I think discussion is healthy, but I also think it’s dangerous to conflate your opinion (interpretation) of a fact as the fact itself.

I did a bad job writing it, but I am not conflating fact and opinion, I explicitly said that I could be wrong, and that we have no way to know who is wrong.

I should have worded it better to mean that the quoted part is not “non-debateable” as the GP stated.

I wanted to express that when the author says ”HN is toxic for me” it might be an “non-debateable opinion”, but when they say (paraphrasing) ”Comments that point out what is wrong about something without empathy are upvoted on HN” I think that’s a totally debateable opinion. And I have an opposing view.

> Well first, you took a well-meaning article discussing how HN can be toxic.

You can look at the article as an attack on a forum's reputation, and consequently on their users, by fabricating baseless blanket accusations of being a toxic community, when in truth at most it just shows people disagreeing or pointing out misconceptions and factual errors.

Would we be toxic if a random troll started insisting that the sky was green and the community posted that the troll was wrong and the sky was in fact blue?

> As a regular, I disagree completely.

As someone else here indicated, I think this is the part that implies superiority in some way (and as a result could be interpreted as to negative). Both 'as a regular' (meaning you must not be or you rank lower than me I earned my stripes) and 'disagree completely' (meaning you are totally and entirely wrong in what you are saying which always hurts).

You could have left that out entirely and your comment would stand on it's own.

Now I don't think that people need to walk on eggshells but maybe they should (sometimes).

Example let's say you met 'BIG IMPORTANT PERSON THAT MATTERED TO YOU IN SOME WAY' (in person) and they made a comment to you about something. Would you start by saying 'As a regular I disagree completely'. Maybe you might (I wouldn't) but if you think about it that would immediately set the wrong tone to what followed.

I used “regular” because the author used the word “regular” to imply that any regular would agree with him. I wanted to state that I am a regular and I disagree.

I used the word “imply” above, because in the text the author only explicitly says that a regular would see that there are toxic comments some times. But my impression, from the that and other remarks on the text, is that they are implying that a regular would agree that HN is toxic. Like they are trying to expose a consensus. So I wanted to push back and state that there is no such consensus.

And the “disagree completely” is explained in another comment.

I wouldn’t worry about the word games. The person who accused you of toxicity seems just to be looking for an easy target to attack. The other commenters are simply rationalizing lazy, snarky misbehavior.

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