Please don't take HN threads into regional flamewar. It's understandably annoying when people are dissing the place you're from, or you feel they are, but a flamewar like this should obviously not be at the top of the page (where it was stuck after collecting tons of upvotes, as flamewar comments often do), and you shouldn't be breaking the site guidelines yourself when something annoys you. Instead, you should follow the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and this one in particular: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.". In egregious cases you can email us at [email protected] so we can take care of them.

Every time I've looked in this thread, the comments I saw referencing Ohio were overwhelmingly positive ("brilliant location", etc.). In fact, after skimming this thread, I couldn't find a single comment that matched your description. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they must be a tiny minority of what got posted here. (Edit: I saw your list at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031374 - the comments you were reacting to were not representative in the slightest, and you misinterpreted several of them.)

There's a strong tendency to fall prey to the bias of noticing, or putting a greater weight on, the ones that felt negative to you (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This is a function of your own pre-existing condition (I don't mean you personally—this is true of all of us), of being ready to flare up at the first thing that feels like a trigger. In that sense, what we're all actually encountering when we get triggered on the internet are our own pre-existing feelings. No wonder people find it hard to talk to each other about inflammatory topics.

The comments you've "quoted" in your first paragraph, for example, simply don't exist. The only occurrence of "Ohio sucks" in the entire HN dataset (I just checked) is the one in your own post. That's how that cognitive bias works, and that's how we get flamewars like this. People here (you, me, and everyone else) need to manage our own inflammation a little differently so we don't end up with complete derails like this, which are not in the spirit of this site nor in the interest of anyone in the community.

I'm going to mark this flamewar off topic now.