Comment by heartbeats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heartbeats | Hacker News Reader

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I wouldn't think I am - I've had a bad run with the last few, but I do endeavor to post seriously, I'm not rude in comment threads, and what I am posting is not unrelated to the topic.

If you disagree, please let me know and I'll take a look at them.

To elaborate on my comment, which I think is neither insubstantive nor flamebait: It's absurd to suggest that users are not to blame here. On one hand, they complain about it, but on the other hand, they obviously use the app, or else they wouldn't bother maintaining it. Being subject to all of this tracking nonsense is what within economics is known as a 'revealed preference'. In other words, it is the case that the users chose this future, or as the meme goes, this is the future you chose.

From the outside, you've been posting a lot of low effort comments. Take this one for example --- if the 'elaboration' was part of the first comment, it would have been solid. As it was, it only addressed people who already agreed with your unspoken conclusion. Yes, it's more effort to make the full comment the first time, but it makes for a better site overall.

I comment here because I upvoted several of your comments on the Mike Godwin thread earlier today because I thought they were unfairly downvoted. But even in those cases, you probably could have prevented the downvotes if you'd spent a little more effort of making your case in the opening comment, rather than defending it in the followups.

Your point of view is appreciated, so please stick around despite the downvotes. But at the same time, please take the effort to post higher quality initial comments so that you avoid most of those downvotes.

Thank you for the feedback; I truly appreciate it. However, I am unsure whether it actually holds true; the elaborating comment to which you are replying currently stands at -1.

It's supported behavior to downvote comments based on disagreement[0][1], so it seems like the system is working as it should.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

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