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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

It's always fun to remember how rude people were about Dropbox on here.

More seriously though, in many ways HN is a pretty broad church. You're always going to get a spectrum of opinions, and some portion of people are always going to be particularly forceful about putting forth their opinion. Maybe it's a bad day, maybe it's habit, varies from person to person and day to day, etc.

But I think, if you're posting something to HN (or, really, any large internet forum), negative feedback - and dismissive feedback - is something you need to be prepared for as part and parcel of the experience because it often is going to happen.

Not that I agree with the person you're responding to - their remark struck me as quite a mean-spirited and unnecessary comment, and I very much prefer your perspective.

Anyway, I've bookmarked the site so make of that what you will.

View on HN

> negative feedback - and dismissive feedback - is something you need to be prepared

OK. Let's RFM: first line = "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

So, no, it's not HN-OK for rude & unfounded feedback to make it to the top comment.

Even if the website is "bad" (i.e. those 30 papers were never linked to Ilya etc.), the proper way of handling this is to call it out in a neutral way.

I think you're misunderstanding me or over-interpreting what I've said. I'm not justifying or excusing the unkind behaviour, and I'm aware of the site terms on HN.

What I'm saying is that in large online forums - regardless of terms of use - some people are unkind, and that it's a good idea to be prepared for that when you post something publicly.

fwiw for all the praise that dang & co get, they moderated this website into this state. there is a "blessed" way to break the rules and be a total asshole to people here, and there is the "other" way, that they punish relentlessly. we all have bad days, but HN's comments are just an exhausting cesspool of cynicism and cheap takes for the most part these days.

dang does not scale. It’s on us to make this place how we want it to be. Every comment matters

> some portion of people are always going to be particularly forceful about putting forth their opinion. Maybe it's a bad day, maybe it's habit, varies from person to person and day to day, etc.

I have no problem that someone had a bad reaction to this and needs to vent, I have a problem that the community deems it the most noteworthy comment and keeps it voted to the very top of the thread.

Probably a lot of people voting aren't aware of the terms of use. But, at any rate, it's certainly not the top comment now - it often takes a couple of hours or so for voting to settle out and the initial top comment quite often doesn't stay that way.

The criticisms are valid, though: no source, no connection to the source.

You would think a university student would understand the importance of citing sources.

It's hard sometimes because say it's something that I wrote but someone else posted to HN, I've just had a lot of people's opinions foisted on me.

I'm relatively immune to a lot of things, but we're also entering a world where a lot of people can build and might not expect to have potentially millions of people critiquing their work to the level they do.

I think this is one reason people like asking LLMs things. They have many downsides, but they're never rude or belittling.

We are way past that point now. It's a common tendency around here, especially taking into account how often those type of posts are actually the ones on the top. Gladly we still have people like your parent to call them out immediately.

Yeah, but eventually the downvoting/community moderation will do its work: it just takes a few hours sometimes. But the original unkind remark has gone from top level comment to nowhere near the top of the discussion (at least I haven't managed to find it other than via my own profile because of all the newer and more upvoted discussion that's happened) fairly quickly.

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