Being a recent "victim"[1] of trolling here on HN, I understand pg's sentiment. However, the question is, has HN (since 2008, anyways) fallen into the pit with the trolls? For example, recently there was the thing with Rob Malda's resume. The entire thread on that was rather derailed into either sucking up to Rob, or saying Slashdot is full of trolls. Or rather, it had a rather unfavorable signal to noise ratio. I tr…
In that discussion they were not trolling you, at least not intentionally. Instead you were seeing what happens when you combine a strong dose of cognitive dissonance with the ability to downvote. This is a common effect in HN and other so called "enlightened" communities because they do have higher concentrations of honestly intelligent people, people particularly susceptible to cognitive dissonance. When you say so…
Which, you know. He was. HN voters have this tendency to downvote posts that sound like crazy-person conspiracy theorizing, for some strange reason. (I downvoted him because he was maliciously inaccurate--mistakes happen, but that wasn't a mistake. That was fabrication.)