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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

I hate Unity as next guy, but please don't do this. Vote with your engine choice, not death threat.

First, prove that a credible death threat actually happened. And by credible, a baseline for that should be an actual police report being filed, putting somebody on the hook for possible false police reports if it was fabricated.

All public claims of death threats when somebody is going through a bad PR cycle should be considered somewhat suspect unless some kind of police report or credible evidence is provided.

> First, prove...

No. Don't send death threats!

This shouldn't need to be predicated by anything. If Unity made this whole story up, still don't.

Can you please point to where I ever endorsed sending death threats?

PRO TIP: You can't.

Never implied you did.

Their point is do we even know a death threat was sent? Or is Unity just trying to get the previous news about their licensing change buried under some sympathetic story about a death threat being sent?

I get that, but remember the context:

> I hate Unity as next guy, but please don't do this. Vote with your engine choice, not death threat.

Do we care if a death threat was actually sent in this context? Would it change anything about this statement?

Did they mean to reply to someone else?

> Would it change anything about this statement?

Yes it would change immensely. How would HN feel if I falsely claimed I was getting death threats from members so I could get attention.

Terrible! But I would still feel the same about this:

> Vote with your engine choice, not death threat.

Wouldn't you?

I don't think the person making the threat is reading HN comments. Not sure who you're addressing here.

Yea. I don't blame OP for the sentiment but I don't think anyone doing something like that could be reasoned with in the first place.

If we don't speak out against it, show alternate forms of rebelling, then more people will see violence as acceptable responses to anger.

HN aggressively moderates hateful and harmful comments, so they’re often not seen before they get flagged or removed. I’ve personally reported enough comments this year that I’m confident saying that some number of people who use threats of violence to silence those they disagree with are both reading and participating on HN, and so by the lurker principle, many more are reading HN but not behaving in that manner here. Thankfully, those few that participate are not the majority — but their perceived absence is the result of both peer pressure (via flags) and moderators (via bans) silencing their speech, not due to ‘we’re better than that here’.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. HN can't see an article on a open source frontend framework without someone equating it's maintainer to Hitler or getting on a soap box about how they're ruining the web. People in here have a view of the world that is rarely shared, even by people in tech.

Take an actual company making a visibly greedy decision and I would not be surprised.

It's an open forum. I just watched one get removed from this very thread.

Either the perpetrator or any potential copycats who might think to do the same.

This sort of crap becoming widespread will eventually result in the death of privacy for everyone.

HN has literal nazis (as in "death to all jews") occasionally posting. We aren't special

If you can buy upvotes for a platform, then it's probably big enough that a nonzero percentage of its users is exactly the kind of person who would make death threats.

Sure, but i said “the person“. I think the odds of him talking to that person are effectively zero.

And as if his message is going to change his mind! Thus my question.

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