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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

No, "Minors can't learn of trans people? What other people should they be warned of, Jews?" is starting a flamewar. This is not a borderline call.

I think it's pretty clear what "the flamewar style" means to anyone who's been around internet forums for a little while, but if you want a definition, it could be somewhere in the neighborhood of: conversation that's focused on aggressive/snarky/indignant expression for the purpose of venting and/or defeating opponents, as opposed to curious, respectful conversation for the purpose of learning from each other. These two are mutually exclusive, and on this site we want the latter, not the former. Your GP comment was the former, as for that matter was your reply to me here.

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Respectful conversation involves sarcasm and satire. I hope we are not in church to avoid using those. I wasn't using aggression against the person I was replying to and my comment was pretty calm, was it? What is really flamewary and pretty rude to say is stating that trans people need an NSFW tag. If you so much want to avoid flamewars, whatever this means, you probably should have replied to that person in the first place.

It's hard to discern whether you're misreading this whole thread on purpose or not. Nobody is claiming that trans content in general is NSFW, but that a certain subset of content therein, displayed openly on the site is -- which OP evidently agrees with. If you think OP is anti-trans, I don't know who you think is pro-.

> Respectful conversation involves sarcasm and satire

It can in some contexts! For example with friends or close colleagues, or a small group of familiars. But the context is the dominant variable.

In a context like HN (a large, public, optionally anonymous internet forum), sarcasm and satire and snark are likely to come across as cheap attacks. The odds of that are so high that such messages should either be avoided or disambiguated enough that the median reader—someone who doesn't know you or anything about you—can still detect that you're conversing respectfully.

This sucks a bit—it means we're all subject to a certain blandness here. But the alternative is the war of all against all, followed by scorched earth, and that isn't much of a choice.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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