It’s important to distinguish events that are likely from those which are unlikely. Otherwise you may mislead someone.
Who the poster is and what they've said in the past are completely irrelevant.
Good rule of thumb: Would the rebuttal remain the same if responding to a different poster? If no, then the rebuttal is probably an ad hominem.
There is a whole army of people out there who have a serious problem with accepting reality and it is useful to point out that someone is arguing with someone else who does not accept reality as it is commonly experienced. That saves everybody time, just like we don't feed the trolls we also should not waste cycles on engaging people who refuse to accept evidence anyway. Think of it as a PSA rather than an ad-hominem attack, you are assuming that the argument was brought in good faith, I don't.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'm not responsible for flamebait by expressing my opinion. Maybe the moderation system is to be overhauled to account for more diverse opinions ? I observed when I tell things half the time I get points half the time I get downvoted.
Are one-sided debates more fun ? Yes, if you want a reflexion of yourself in a mirror.
In any case I don't try to be this way intentionnally.
Is free speech still a thing ?
In any case if my opinion is not needed here I will go spend energy elsewhere. Community can be toxic and it's becoming the case here.
Re-reading all my comments I stand firm, no aggression there, just opinions.
Best regards, I know your work is very hard !
We're trying to be a specific kind of site. For that we need people to post in a certain way: thoughtfully, respectfully, substantively. If you post that way, you're making a positive contribution. If you don't post that way, then you're contributing to destroying this place (for its intended purpose), which is not in your interest, because the community and culture here are what makes HN worth participating in in the first place.
I'm sure you wouldn't litter in a city park or dump motor oil in a mountain lake, right? You'd treat those resources carefully because you know how valuable they are, and how we all have to hold them in common. It's like that here. I don't see that as an "expressing my opinion" issue—if someone dumped motor oil in a mountain lake and you asked them about it and they said "this is how I express myself", that would not be persuasive.
People tend to vastly underestimate the damage they cause (let's say 10x) and vastly overestimate the damage that other people cause (let's say another 10x), which leads to a 100x bias in evaluating these things. That's why everyone feels innocent and aggrieved and why it's so obvious that other people are the problem. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear!
If you're interested in reading a much longer explanation, here is an exchange I had with another user who was in a similar situation a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161491. I took a lot of time to write that out (it's basically an essay) because this comes up fairly regularly. The point is that the issue isn't really a moral one ("don't say bad things") - it's an optimization problem ("how do we sustain an internet forum that doesn't suck"). If you understand that then maybe you'll feel less like the moderation here is against you.