You certainly demonstrated the fallacy. You took the most absurd interpretation of my words that is possible in a literal sense because that's easier for you to mock.
Describing someone's behavior as entitled doesn't amount to making a false claim. That's the most obvious interpretation of what I actually said. But you took it to mean that any claim of entitlement can't be false.
> Your imagining someone to be entitled does not make them so, and your accusation belittles their actual, valid reasoning.
There's no imagination or accusation involved here when the very comment I'm referring to is right here in this very thread. It's a statement of fact.
The parts I quoted are ad hominem attacks that accuses someone of neglecting an obligation that objectively doesn't exist. That's the dictionary definition of entitlement.
> It actually shows you to be the one "entitled" to your projected redeclaration of their identity and rationale
Like misrepresenting my words or calling me "narcissistic?"
> potentially shared value-based opinion about the facts being criticised
The parts I quoted isn't a fact-based criticism. It's an ad hominem attack.
> irrellevant as calling out someone for being "entitled to breathe air" if you catch them criticizing the air's quality
Everyone is entitled access to clean air. People have an obligation to keep the air clean.
No one is entitled access to free labor, including having your pet features implemented and maintained in a software project.
But overall, gosh. How many fallacies, misrepresentations, and personal insults can you pack in such a short comment?
> intentionally-faulty software
> the maintainer only caved
> he's harming his users with his stubbornness
is strong language and not productive. If someone at my company sincerely criticized my work in this way I'd find it unacceptable and managers would get involved. There's criticism and there's polemics, and this is the latter.
I would agree there is a line, but disagree that the original poster stepped over it. Disagreement, even vigorous disagreement is important.
Calling out bad technical decisions is important.
Calling out oversensitive people who want to censor online discourse to their personal tastes is also important.
Furthermore, ad hominem attacks have nothing to do with "calling out bad technical decisions."
BTW go take my words verbatim and use it against me if my actions are genuinely hypocritical. But to do that for my actions you made up is abusive and makes you look bad.
Fair, but I'd hold HN to a higher standard. We're peers and we choose to be here. We should treat each other with kindness and respect, not contempt. I read a fair amount of contempt in OP's characterization, and I hold that separate from respectful criticism.
I looked up a thread about this from 2020 [0] and it actually seems well reasoned, calm, and respectful. No one's slinging around words like "faulty", "broken", or "harm" because those tend to insult people and derail technical discussions.
And FWIW, that's why I would get managers involved if this happened in the workplace. Calling people's work "broken by design" or "harmful" is how to start an argument, not how to solve a problem. If someone's acting this way, there's no way things are going well.
And while I’d agree in principle that nobody is entitled to anyone else’s labor for free, I’d also add that nobody is entitled to be shielded from criticism of work they have chosen to publish, or to have that criticism be watered down to a sanitized, milquetoast version of the writer’s intended message.