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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

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