Hacker News Reader

I've never made a comment on HN commenting on someone else's tone, but I've seen this exact response, word for word, a lot recently on many posts. I don't like this trend. I find it to be adversarial and in bad faith. Suppose they did read the article. Are they likely to reply to you defending themselves? Next time, please address the actual content of their comment instead.

View on HN

I'm not sure what to make of your hypothetical question about the GP commenter's likelihood of responding, since the first (and only) response to this when I went to bed was from walrus01, whom I was responding to and had a brief conversation with.

I commented in this way because the article directly addressed the problems with the GP comment, and the GP comment made no mention of it. There's also a pattern on HN and elsewhere of comments popping up in top-level threads made in bad faith to derail and redirect conversation, especially on anything related to power generation or renewables. Telling someone to "address the actual content" is precisely what I was doing.

Not the original poster and perhaps it was adversarial, but I think it is also pretty clear that they did not read the article. Of course, they won't admit that (who wants to admit not reading the article?) so they will reply contextualizing their point to the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com