I agree with you on all counts—I feel like you guys are massively misunderstanding my comment and somehow taking it as an attack on the notion of ham radio, as if somehow I feel like it's some kind of evil. I don't. I never did. It can be a great, useful, awesome thing. Where did I deny this? All I was saying was that "no downsides except the equipment cost" is emphatically not an accurate picture—and I feel accurate pictures are important regardless of how awesome something is. In this case it matters because I don't want some poor soul to read this, go buy the equipment, and then discover (hopefully not the hard way) that his (say) encrypted communication is illegal, and everything he says must be public to the whole world. I don't get why everyone here is so quick to extrapolate from "X isn't perfect, it has tradeoffs Y/Z" to "X utterly sucks, I hate it, and it needs to stop existing". It isn't helpful; it's a real turn-off that just sucks the energy out of what could be a more meaningful/nuanced/informative discussion.

I'm pretty sure you are reading a lot more into the replies than anyone intended. Your reply to me has a lot of nuance that wasn't in your original comment, where all you said was:

> What about the fact that everyone in the world who can receive your signal will hear and understand what you're saying?

The replies to that comment merely pointed out that this is how amateur radio works, that it is by design public communication. I don't see any indication that anyone interpreted your comment to mean "Ham radio utterly sucks, I hate it, and it needs to stop existing."

A long time ago I took a course in effective communication. I don't think of myself as a great communicator, and I don't remember much of the course. But one thing stuck in my mind: If you feel that people are failing to understand what you are trying to say, don't blame them for misunderstanding you. Instead, look to see how you can communicate more clearly so you will not be misunderstood.

In all honesty I find it borderline impossible to say things in such a way that I will not be misunderstood on HN, at least if I plan to get anything else done during the rest of my day. A lot of people here go out of their way to misinterpret and/or take the most extreme interpretation of every comment, or to just change the discussion topic to something else while ignoring the actual comment.

Case in point for all of these was here: I was trying to replying to was "there is no downside to X but Y", and I replied with "what about Z?". A logical response could have ranged anywhere from "Yes, Z is also a downside that is worth mentioning" to "I'm not sure, because $reasons", to "No, Z is not really a downside because it would cause problem W". But instead people just went out of their ways to just ignore the actual point and provide replies ranging from "if you don't like it don't use it" (this was you, defending ham radio, as if me pointing out 1 downside is an attack on the entire concept) to "feature, !bug" (as if I somehow thought Z was an accident, or as if something being intentional automatically implies it must be an upside) to "that's how V behaves too" (which is wrong because, no, V doesn't force Z to happen, and even when Z does happen, it's far harder to exploit... and which, even if correct, would also be irrelevant to the point in the first place).

It's not that I can't, it's just that it honestly sucks all energy out of me (and the time out of my day) to try to preempt all these kinds of misinterpretations or topic changes from my comment. Not just that, but even when I do find the time and energy to do this, I just find that others come along who just cherry-pick the one sentence they disagree with and ignore all the rest of the comment explaining the nuances behind that one sentence. When I'm writing an article or a paper where the stakes are higher, I do find it worthwhile to try to do that (and it's still not easy). But over here, I just kind of always have this glimmer of hope that people will not go out of their way to start an uphill battle for me when non ever existed in the first place.