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Comment by _zzaw | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little surprised at this response, dang. I could understand if I was being hostile to the poster, but my sarcasm was directed at Musk (who they're quoting), whose comment about data pillaging I find highly dubious.

As far as snark, I see several other examples of that—also intended for Musk—in this thread. They don't strike me as either offensive or particularly constructive, so it's not clear to me why my comment was called out here. (Especially considering that there are a few other comments that definitely go beyond the acceptable levels of user-to-user snark as I understand them.)

I can avoid sarcastic comments about billionaires in the future, if that's a problem. If the issue was snark directed at another user, that wasn't my intention.

I'll also say that the "snark" rule you cited, while well-intentioned, seems very broad and selectively applied here.

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To be fair the rule says “don’t be snarky”

It does not say “don’t be snarky unless scarasm is directed at a billionaire because then it’s ok because they have a lot of money and power, so we will allow it”.

You would then need to define some amount of money that would put someone in then “can be flamed” category.

The rule is not applied selectively here; it is applied to everyone, Musk included.

I mean—your response just now was snarky also. I don't think you were responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what I said, either.

I'd say what's not clear to me is what to avoid in the future. I'm not trying to be difficult here—and dang is one guy dealing with the internet version of a city, to be sure—but I see sarcasm all the time on HN. The really toxic, demeaning stuff, sure, that has to go. In this case, it never even crossed my mind that what I said would be interpreted as targeting the person I was replying to. (While I wouldn't have flagged it, your snarky response, by contrast, was pretty clearly targeting me.)

Looking over the thread—and HN in general—there are no end of snarky posts, including yours, and especially in regards to wealthy tech guys like Musk. The vast majority of them are permitted. That's what I mean by "selectively." Going by your interpretation, no snark would be welcome at all; if that isn't the case, which I didn't have the impression it was, then what was it about my post that warranted a response more than the others?

Genuine question. I can observe consistent rules, but I'm not seeing consistent application of this one.

Can't you just take good advice without getting so defensive? It's not a life or death matter.

Moderation is dominated by randomness - we don't come close to seeing all the comments on HN or even all the comments in any large thread. That's 90% of the answer to "why did my comment get moderated and not those other ones". (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)

The reason I saw your comment rather than the other ones is that it was heavily upvoted and right near the top of the page—and that's just the problem: snarky, shallow comments attract upvotes, which causes them to occupy prime real estate, crowding out better discussion, and that distorts the character of the thread and ultimately of the site itself. This is one of the biggest problems HN faces, if not the biggest.

You can say that this problem is caused more by upvotes than by comments, and I agree - but we can't address the problem at the upvote level (at least not publicly), and anyway if the flypaper weren't hung in the first place, the flies wouldn't have thronged to it.

It's impossible not to "selectively apply" the rules, the same way that not every speeder gets a speeding ticket, and of course when you've seen other people speeding worse than you (which they invariably do), it feels unfair that you're the one who gets pulled over. The main things to realize are (1) it's nothing personal; (2) the randomness evens out in the long run; and (3) the only way to keep HN going in a good way is for enough commenters to understand this and take up the work of following the site guidelines (or really, the intended spirit of the site) even when they see others not doing it. I hope this helps explain things a bit...

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