Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you please not post name-calling comments or personal attacks (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20809349 and, worse, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20709280 ) to HN? We ban accounts that break the site guidelines like that. If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post only in the intended spirit or not at all, we'd be grateful.
While obviously I don't agree with the comment you're responding to (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20813149 ), I wanted to ask you if there's a way I could have phrased the comment it was responding to to be less inflammatory. I didn't anticipate that it would provoke such responses, and I wonder if there's a way to avoid it other than just silence.
Many readers are locked and loaded for such responses to begin with, and since firing back provides a certain release, they don't tend to scrutinize the text they're reacting to very closely to see if it really does say what they're reacting to, or what other interpretations there might be. The HN guidelines specifically ask users to do the latter ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."), but that requires a slower reflective process than is available in the locked-and-loaded case.
This is compatible with what nkurz said, because shorter comments admit of more interpretations. It also implies a mitigation that, in practice, seems to work: include disambiguating information to rule out provocative interpretations. The more provocative a possible interpretation is, the more flame retardant you probably need to pack with your message. This sucks, because it makes you responsible for deflecting things you don't mean, which can be a tedious and political way to communicate. In practice, though, if you really aren't issuing a provocation (e.g. dumb ideological boilerplate), it often suffices to share more of your thought process, especially anything unusual or unpredictable about it, and that tends to make for a more interesting comment too.