Hacker News Reader

Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure you didn't intend this, but your comment is strongly reminiscent of this classic Russian political tactic for dealing with criticism from the west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

View on HN

I didn't intend it ... and it looks like I probably shouldn't have gone reminiscing in an HN comment!

HN tends to have waves of (for lack of a better term) "troll hunters" who come here with an attitude that everyone here is commenting in bad faith and must be called out for it. They will do it to commenters from all sides of an argument, even in cases like this where it was clear your comment was simply remembering a past event and not intended to be anything else.

I haven't figured out if they mean well and are just sorely misguided, or are actually trolls themselves here from places like Reddit where such bad faith activity actually happens in every single post.

I'm not in it for the karma and don't worry about being down-voted when I'm writing a thoughtful but perhaps contrary comment. Sometimes (like now) it teaches me that I'm out of step with the "mood" of the commons. That's fine too.

Recognizing a somewhat similar incident from one's own country's history is not at all "whataboutism", especially when there was no obvious intent to diminish the impact of the original subject or otherwise distract from it. Not every comment on a web forum is an attempt to argue or act in bad faith.

You're right of course, at the time of writing there were only 2 comments in this thread, and both were along the same lines which made the effect seem more pronounced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com