> This is pretty representative of what I'm calling the flamewar style
It would be good to have a HN dictionary of terms. The normal internet definition of a flamewar is "a hostile, prolonged argument on the internet that devolves into personal attacks, insults, and aggressive behavior". I said "all coding is vibe coding". Not really a personal attack or aggressive, is it? Glad to know now there's a separate HN definition for this term though. Thank you for correcting my terrible behavior. (That was sarcasm, by the way, not an aggressive attack; I know this can be hard to interpret)
> It's enough to offer a different view, or explain what you think a more correct view is.
I already offered a different view, in detail, and their response was to double down on the opposite of that view. I would be reiterating the same original point. In order to express the inherent flaw in the view, I associated it to another view most people today find abhorrent. It's high risk, but I have nothing to lose, because they already disagreed with my point.
> In fact, if the other person senses that you're trying to "get them to see how ridiculous their argument is", or indeed to "get them" to do anything at all, they usually react primarily to that quality, and only secondarily to any argument
I mostly comment on HN to inform the casual viewer that there is a different view than that of the majority echo chamber. I don't need the person I'm replying to to agree with me. I'm trying to reach the person whose brain isn't yet shut down to logic and reason. I admit sometimes it comes off as dickish, which is regretful, but hopefully still makes my point.
> because it breaks the implicit contract of curious conversation
Almost nobody on the internet has agreed to such a contract. Most people's brains implicitly believe that whatever they already think is correct, unless presented with some irrefutable proof, or argued by a person they implicitly trust. Many people are curious, but not so curious as to want their mind changed by strangers. Which is why people lean on the heuristics of popularity, authority, success, etc to choose what to believe. Most people don't have curious conversations, they have disagreements and agreements.
HN is the epicenter of the tech contrarian, here to disagree with any prevailing wisdom and consider any claims that don't sound like "common sense" as suspect. You've built a wall to keep out intelligence and evidence, and inflate the power of the crowd to make certain opinions seem more valid, depending on who happens to have more traction in the comments. I believe it's a feature built into this platform to increase engagement and controversy to increase site traffic.