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Comment by codeonfire | Hacker News Reader

"Did hackernews become hateboard?"

No. you're just upset because you're afraid HN is losing its hip factor. Your links don't point to examples of negative comments, they point to images of a couple of people making negative comments about HN.

There is nothing wrong with the comments on this message board, and attempts to censor just to meet your ideal comment is stupid and wrong. The correct course of action for you is to start a new, hipper message board where you can post all you want about how awful the old one was and how you knew about it when it was still good. Please do this (hipsternews.com is taken).

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thanks for proving my point.

It proves none of your point. Your links don't prove your point either. You link to some tweets where people complain about HN, not to examples of supposed 'negative' posts. You are clearly worried about what others think of hacker news.

While the start-up biz may be all about pr, image, and hipness, Hacker-ism is about keeping the truth and contempt for authority. If HN needs to be sanitized for the sake of some software personalities sticking around, then maybe users were mistaken in coming here because the site is named hacker news not hipster scene start-up pr news.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore

the whole problem i'm describing here is you (codeonfire). and it doesn't surprise me that you don't see it. let me try to show you.

you've wrongly (psycho)analyzed me/my viewpoint (i'm upset HN losing it's hip factor), misrepresented my proposal (censorship), then took your own analysis as a fact, and called me/my opinion "stupid" and "wrong" based on that.

of course, you didn't stop there, to add a bit of sarcasm and humor, you went on and checked the domain name that would remedy my non-existing problem. that's why i thanked you for proving my point.

this is a great example of low-quality hate content. it almost is a template, we can write a bot that exactly does what you do.

i'd normally not write back and pass, like many others, but just for this post's sake, i'm keeping this conversation on. also you said my links were pointless, let's put some other links here, quick glance at your comment history:

http://d.pr/CChr http://d.pr/IUYL http://d.pr/Hk9d

just to clarify, despite of low quality content you produce (to be fair, i also saw neutral ones) i'd never ban you, wouldn't try to suppress anything you want to say. i respect your viewpoint as much as you disrespect me and others.

i'd just like this system to put some measures so you express them respectfully. that's all.

"called me/my opinion "stupid" and "wrong" based on that"

Lets be clear. I never made any personal comments, and you didn't really offer an idea except to say that your goal is to "balance negatives and positives" I said any attempts to censor comments to meet your ideal comment is stupid and wrong, and whether or not censorship is what you want, I don't see why someone would disagree with this. If you start removing comments that one person doesn't like, then a forum becomes a simple pr blog.

"despite of low quality content you produce..." "i'd just like this system to put some measures so you express them respectfully..."

in the interests of moving on, i won't comment on these.

I agree that hacker-ism is about keeping truth and contempt for authority. A true hacker will create an innovative solution for that problem. Good example is Richard Stallman, when others used law and authority to stop him from hacking, he went on to create GNU, wrote emacs and released it under GPL. Some hackers may write a language or OS, while other hackers may create a business. There is nothing wrong both. It is based on the personality and specific problem they are hacking. The point of this post is that we focus on the positive aspect.

Yeah, seriously. Was it necessary to add "stupid and wrong"? Your suggestion that he go off and play by himself at a new message board probably would have sufficed without that thoughtful addition.

I totally agree. The whole point of Hacker News is to be a positive environment for techies and startup founders to share knowledge and discuss intellectually stimulating issues. Negativity and personal attacks really have no place here.

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