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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

What? That's quite silly. [...] I'm sorry, but your assertion isn't borne out by thought.

This comment would have been better without its hostile preface and its hostile appendix. Please don't use such language on Hacker News.

All: Please re-read what you've posted and, if it contains phrases that contribute hostility to the discussion, edit them out.

This is really important, because (speaking metaphorically) our brains are all programmed to pick up on the agitation in such language. That leads to bad things, like the comment getting less reflective attention, and threads getting provoked into a downward spiral.

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This is meant in all seriousness (and posted here instead of private mail because it is something that others could probably benefit from reading):

The preface is the gist of my post ("I disagree with your reasoning, and find it absurd."), and the appendix summarizes the conclusion ("The conclusion you've come to does not follow logically once you take into account other factors").

I agree (having written some bad posts in my time) that writing "You're a fucking idiot, how the hell did you come up with this?" is not good discourse.

At the same time, avoiding any flavor or diction in our writing here would make it tedious to read and worse still boring to write.

There's got to be some middle-ground; I assure you that it wasn't written to be hostile (consider the corrective reply and my acknowledgement elsewhere in this subthread).

EDIT: Also, where do you come down on the "meta discussion kills" theory of communities?

I am confident that the creative and intelligent users of Hacker News can figure out how to retain "flavor and diction" while making their writing more substantive and less rude.

Meta discussion is bad on HN. My current stream of meta comments is a special case, and temporary. Sometimes one prescribes medicine that is toxic because the disease is worse. Hacker News' disease is unsubstantive and hostile language in comments. We're pushing hard against this problem from several angles. Providing clear feedback to the community is one.

I don't want to jinx it by commenting on how well it's going so far, but I would definitely like to invite any of you who notice a change, for better or worse, to tell us about it at hn@ycombinator.com. We'll read it with interest.

(Edited for less risk of jinxing.)

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