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Comment by PCGamer_Empath | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really sure how I am supposed to retroactively go back in time and register earlier.

Since you are handing out free advice, is it normally considered polite or helpful here to accuse people of using fake accounts? Is assuming that a person speaking with confidence about a topic may have some direct knowledge of that topic somehow rude or against the rules?

If you're speaking confidently on behalf of the person that I was responding to, are you sure that you reflect their opinion faithfully? If the GP wanted to say "I refuse to give more details about the fund due to the phrasing of your request for details," surely they could have typed that themselves.

Namaste!

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Since you arent a sockpuppet and just new, do you really feel confident to have hit the right tone here, even after somebody gave you a heads up how a conversation is more likely to be fruitful?

You dont need to speak on behalf of OP to give you a heads up about a common problem with your approach, its pretty universal. Picture it this way, there is list of common problems which make a sensible discussion less likely. Which might be overlooked if you havent heard about it before. For example your sentences being too convoluted or having a bad structure. Another one of those is needlessly escalating a conversation.

That kind of boils down to what the aim of your post is. If its not aimed at having a fruitful engaging conversation that might proof your wrong, then you are either doing it for yourself or to set an atmosphere. Which is where the assumption of a sockpuppet comes from.

Differently put, what good does your post if its not aimed at getting somebody to engage in a meaningful way? And if that is your aim, you might want to take his advice, you generally get better results.

>do you really feel confident to have hit the right tone here, even after somebody gave you a heads up how a conversation is more likely to be fruitful?

Considering that the person whom I was addressing responded to my post in a productive manner and we were able to have a civil and thoughtful exchange... Yes?

Do you think it's productive to police the conversations of others in a way that is entirely off topic to the threads? I understand that neither you nor hitekker enjoyed my wording. In the future, when I am speaking to you about a topic in a thread, I'll try to imagine what one's reaction might be if they interpret it as meaning offense before I post. I can't guarantee that I'll always be able to align with your preferred style of decorum, especially since I'm not sure what the rules are here; my post was bad and hitekker's post (an unprovoked off-topic personal attack on me under the auspices of speaking for another person who didn't appear to share their sentiment in the first place) was good.

I won't be engaging any further on the minutae of posting best practices in the discussion thread for the future of the wikimedia project. Have a nice day!

Different registers of english are an interesting conversational issue.

Your phrasing read to me as being close to passive aggressive, but had I been the author of the top level post you were replying to I would have assumed good faith too.

My most common failure mode in HN comments is coming across as more combative than I intended because I tend towards blunt in my communication style. If you look at my comments, you'll note quite a few have a disclaimer in a parenthetical at the end to try and avoid that happening.

Whether or not adopting a similar approach would be remotely useful to you, I genuinely have no idea.

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