Lol, good one. I think it's a holdover from when the forum was a lot tinier, and discussion (especially on the topics it focused on) was a lot more suppressed in most other internet fora. While I don't understand your assumption that "influence" is required to spread awareness, you're probably right that the impulse is anachronistic now.

OTOH, clearly you read this comment, and if even one person like you was prevented from ending up on that forum, it's worth it 1000x over.

Please be generous with your comments. You don’t have to be crass to ‘ruin a place’. I’ve seen it happen just from sheer numbers. Even if the influx measurably improves the signal to noise ratio, just having more signal can make a place exhausting to participate in. Not wanting to risk any advertisement can be a very prudent thing to do.

I was being exactly as generous as I needed to be. This was a person who went out of their way to tell this thread "I belong to bunch of lovely subreddits and I'm deliberately not mentioning them so 'the average HNer' doesn't join". It wasn't even related to their point. They went out of their way in a footnote (!) to rub in the fact that we're so terrible.

> It wasn't even related to their point.

Your comment says:

> If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great

My comment did the exact thing you had already complained about, and my footnote was explicitly addressing the reason for this gap.

It's an incredibly bizarre look to lash out childishly because you can't follow the conversation well enough to remember what you wrote in your previous comment.