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Comment by kunley | Hacker News Reader

I got downvoted for this very short reaction, so, at the risk of having another downvote(s), I want to make a statement:

With my very laconic reply I wanted in fact to convey my congratulations the Lugg creator for their perservance during the hard beginnings of their startup; plus, I strongly believe that the human level of the aspiring enterpreteneur's life is much more HNish in spirit, than endless discsussions circling around running LLM in the basement (or basement-as-a-service) without apparent customers, and somehow strangely the latter seems to be dominating HN comment space. Thanks for listening.

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> I got downvoted for this very short reaction

In part, I expect, due to the double full-stop which looks like it might be a miss-type ellipsis. It makes what could already potentially be seen as a sarcastic “cool story bro” response look even more so.

That, and the fact that HN generally disfavours short reaction comments (including, but not limited to, “Me too!”) which add nothing themselves other than perhaps (in the case of “me too”) an extra anecdata point.

Your follow-up post may well be downvoted too, because complaining about downvotes also being frowned upon (it is seen as adding unnecessary noise to a thread).

Probably because it ends in two dots which makes it look like you're being dismissive and rude.

Mmm, oh really, in my naive world two dots just mean some reflection.. (did it again).

But I get your point, thank you. Although it is kind of scary people read that much between the lines.

It's definitely not intentional. It's just pattern recognition trying to recreate a humans voice and facial expressions from an extremely limited set of information. The less information, the more extrapolation has to take place, and if you provide basically no information but with a specific emotional signifier on it then that signifier becomes the main information converted in the text. Had you typed a sentence or two of your other comment with the 2 dots on the end people probably would have read it more charitably. But as it stands, the 2 dots are the only information available and so it reads like sarcasm and dismissal are the singular goal of your comment. This interpretation can be prevented by providing more guiding information in the comment.

There’s a guy at my work that sprinkles .. in every reply. It makes him come off as an asshole. (I’m not the only person in my company that thinks so btw).

Recommend you stop, unless you like coming off as an asshole..

That's quite bad kind of reasoning. Using something from time to time in a context is different than using something all the time, so it should give different reactions.

No matter how you meant it, a reply saying "nice story.." contributes nothing at all to the discussion. And if you were intending to convey anything to the Lugg creator, you were replying in the wrong place.

Try to imagine thousands of people who don't know either you or the person you're replying to reading your reply. If it's meaningless to them, it's probably not worth posting.

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