How to Participate in Hacker News

Yes, I've built up a 4000+ karma not because I some day want to be in YC, but because I like to participate in this community.

However, I've concluded that on the Internet there is no such thing as a good discussion (oh no, a universal statement! Well, let's say there aren't very many good discussions). Perhaps this is due to the vast amount of research material easily accessible to online debaters -- there is no incentive to work together with another individual to come to a conclusion, since the conclusions can be more easily found elsewhere.

Instead, people write things like my diatribe here to "correct" perceived mistakes in others' statements but in the end someone is right and the other is wrong and compromise basically never occurs.

In such a situation, the best thing you can do is make sure that you're the person who is right. Whether you couch your opinion in pandering terms or you state it harshly, the only thing that seems to matter is correctness. It's no longer worth my time to continually attempt to be polite and kind in internet discussion.

tl;dr you're right about that.

People are much more likely, for whatever reason, to dismiss mistakes when the possibility of such is explicitly acknowledged by the author.

I don't care if you're from Seattle or India, or if you're a young guy or an old lady; I care that you're the same person who posted that real interesting post three months ago about certain subject, or with whom I've had some interesting discussion about this or that, and who has a certain opinion about a controversial topic. I don't know if a certain post with your handle comes from the person I know is smart and probably knows what (s)he's talking about, or from some troll.

If I can never be sure if you're the same person, then trust can't be established; it's not about karma as "points," it's about karma as a property of human relations.

It's the same reason why I (almost) never respond to Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot - I'm never sure if the person who replies to me next is the same I was talking to.

But when I'm dealing with non-techies, I see a use to preface any opinion or question with some sort of disclaimer of that sort. I do this in order to lessen the probability that they take offence to what I say and then become uncommunicative. On more than one occasion, I thought we were having a productive conversation about their problems with the software and I find out (when they inexplicably become angry) that they thought I was insinuating their incompetence or lack of intelligence or something.

I think the terse, abrupt style that I and many other techies prefer, comes across as needlessly insensitive to non-techies and we need to be mindful of that if we want to allow them to contribute to this community. (We do like teachers, accountants and shopkeepers commenting on startups in education, finance and retail, right?)

Not to the extent of prefacing everything with patronizing verbiage, but to be mindful not to be too abrupt. Because many people take that as being disrespectful (in my understanding).