Hacker News

So all of this tone policing because I wanted to say RTFM, decided that the initialism didn’t work with RTFA and spelled it out instead, and failed to drop the superfluous “fucking”, thereby making it sound overly harsh. I thought since “fucking” was modifying “article” that the profanity wasn’t directed at the commenter, but still expressed some exasperation on my part.

You’re right, I should have dropped the “fucking”. I was upset because I had just read the article about a topic that concerns me greatly, scanned the comments to see if there was any sense of solidarity that “hey, this is a problem we need to address” and got frustrated when the first comment I read was something that shot from the hip and completely ignored the entirety of the actual article. If not for that, I probably would’ve edited the “fucking” out. That was a failure on my part.

You’re right, that did come across overly aggressive and I apologize to the original commenter. It’s hard to convey tone with text and obviously I failed to communicate this as I never intended my comment to sound so aggressive that it warranted everything that I got in response.

Go back and read everything I’ve written, but omit the word “fucking” and I think you’ll see that one concession to my frustration stands in contrast to the rest of my messages where I was blunt but otherwise respectful. I provided quotes and deflected credit to the original author when it seemed like the credit was being given to me. I never engaged in personal attacks and my only actual criticism was literally that opening line. I hope that demonstrates my true intentions, which were apparently buried by the overly aggressive opening.

I’ve since been told I have shitty behavior and that I’m a “douche”. I never called anyone names, and literally my only call out was “did you even read the fucking article?” You’ve been an order of magnitude more aggressive than I was in the first place and I’ve gotten downvoted and chastised and called names while you’ve gotten supportive comments. I’ve apologized for my behavior without any expectation of reciprocation.

I hate conflict. I hate arguing. It makes me want to just not participate at all online. I don’t need this and as an autistic man it gives me a great deal of stress. I don’t expect you or anyone else to understand or care which is why ordinarily I just lurk online because people seem so eager to jump down my throat. Feels weird and shitty to be accused of doing the same when I failed to police my tone appropriately.

Normally when I do speak up, I’m a consensus maker, trying to bring people together. In fact, this particular topic inspired me to speak up because I’m deathly scared of the direction that current events seem to be headed and I wanted to set my comfort aside in the hopes of seeing that there were other people who wanted to combat this.

It’s disheartening that as fascists worldwide are gaining traction, the most relevant article I’ve seen in a while about it and what to do about it has had discussion completely derailed by criticism about the clickbait headline and subsequent tone policing. If this is where all our energy is going, no wonder fascists are seeing so little pushback.