I wish I had seen this to respond to sooner. I understand how such impressions develop—one sees something callous and recoils from it, and after a few such unpleasant encounters the impression gets transferred to the community as a whole. But that generalization is not valid at all, and actually the mechanism that produces it is a bit callous in its own right. HN members are full of heart and have shown it on countless occasions, as you can see from histories like this:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=thank%20you%20hn&sort=byPo...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=thanks%20hn&sort=byPopular...

It's true that there's too much callousness on this site. But humans are like that on the internet everywhere. There's also a lot of mutual support and humane feeling here, to a rare degree in so large a community. This matters to me personally because we pour our own hearts into trying to get HN to be that way and to stay that way.

Probably, but pointing fingers at a different issue doesn’t help the case for the topic at hand. Whataboutism isn’t acceptable here.