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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Would you please not post comments to HN that consist just of personal attack and bile? What's the information you're really intending to give here? If you'd tell us, perhaps we could learn something, instead of just joining a little flash mob.

Indignation attracts more upvotes than anything else, which means a comment like this will stick to the top of a thread (where I just ran across it a minute ago), collecting mass. In other words, HN can't live by upvotes alone. There need to be countervailing mechanisms, such as flagging, software, and moderation.

Note this from the guidelines: "A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Thankyou dang. This is not personal at all. I wish this person well, I'm sure he's a nice guy!

I wanted to point out a phenomena, that I happen to be passionate about. I have thought alot about this. It was not meant to be a random twitter comment. But I am very serious about this, and hope that people notice this pathology. This guy is clearly lost in his "left-brain" [1]: full of details, trees with no forrest. It's all about plans, manipulation, linearity, verbiage, control. No wider context, no magic. Probably he has an impressive mastery of details, but basically clueless, as I said. Very likely he is a positive energetic person, full of charisma, nice to be around. Yet too often we put these charismats in charge! So that's my Dr. House run-down that I was reluctant to give. In summary, good with spreadsheets, hopeless at finding a direction.

[1] See "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain Mcgilchrist. Awesome book.

In case it helps anyone for the future: in order to make that a good HN comment, two things would have needed to be different. First, much less of the toxic blend of personal language and pejoratives. Second, more information to feed intellectual interest. There many ways to do that, such as bringing in other examples, drawing analogies to other areas, and best of all: describing what works better and explaining why.

Since you've thought about it a lot and are passionate about it, I'm sure that there was no ill intent behind your comment. But somehow your benign intent still translated into a passionate putdown of someone specific. Imagine if you ran across a comment like that about yourself on HN: run for the hills if you meet this guy! Ugh, duh, clueless! It would feel like a gut punch to most of us. When we write such comments, we badly underestimate the impact they might have on whoever we're talking about by 10x or more. In fact, we usually don't take it into account at all.

Another way to mitigate that, and make the comment more interesting, would have been to talk about your own experience, previous encounters you've had with this theme, cases where you've seen it applied, and so on.

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