Comment by dang
2 years ago
You've also done a great deal, unfortunately, to feed these flamewars. For example, you posted 36 (!) times in this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37344925, which applies to several of you, not just Tozen.
The responsibility to fix this lies with you guys because you're the ones who (rightly) care most about the topic. The way I see it, there are two options: either (1) you give up on taking bait, focus 100% on the interesting parts of your work and 0% (and I do mean zero) on defensiveness and provocation, or (2) we just ban this topic from HN. Personally I'm fine either way, and I'm pretty sure the bulk of the community would be also. What I don't want is this status quo headache that comes up every couple months or so.
I'd gladly not waste time by not replying to bait comments spreading debunked claims.
Can these bait comments/threads just be removed to keep HN clean?
No, we don't do that and the community wouldn't support it.
But you say that flamewars are not wanted, and yet they are allowed to be started by a small number of accounts.
All of the flamewar threads in this post were done by 4 accounts, which follow V posts and my comments, and start the flamewars:
1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37296225
The comment by riku_iki is spot on: "You are stalking him with toxic attacks on the minor issues which were resolved long ago; I think language which these people are using (scam, outrageous and frequently false claims, lying) is hard to call "mildly critical", and given they appear in multiple posts and their claims are not directly relevant to post, and proactively initiate all these toxic exchanges, this is exactly stalking."
3) richbell, 11 posts.
4) and a couple of new accounts that were thankfully flagged.
I'm not saying that all criticism of V should be flagged, just posts by such accounts, whose only purpose is to start flame wars.
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