It speaks to your character that you did that.

As I was willingly admitting a character flaw, I was silently wondering whether I'd get a comment from someone unable to not pounce on it.

Ask yourself what the point of your comment is. Are you really in a position to comment on another's character?

Don't do that.

> Are you really in a position to comment on another's character?

> Don't do that.

You literally just fucking did that.

Of course.

Such cheap attacks don't have to be tolerated and it's perfectly fair to point them out for what they are.

I didn't seek out a random comment to take a potshot at - you directly replied to me with a comment that contains nothing but a mean-spirited dig.

Yeah, now I definitely have questions about your character.

You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't do that, and please avoid tit-for-tat spats, regardless of how wrong or provocative someone else is being or you feel they are.

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.

You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't do that, and please avoid tit-for-tat spats, regardless of how wrong or provocative someone else is being or you feel they are.

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.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Go reply to the parent comment with that.

But do they really not hold those views? I know a lot of kids who do things to get a reaction, but I've seen one actually take an ideological perspective that they don't believe in to get one. They just broadcast ideological perspectives they do believe, which they think will get a reaction.

What's some belief you pretended to have, but you really didn't?

> What's some belief you pretended to have, but you really didn't?

Whatever I knew would get a rise out of my audience.

When I was young I could entertain myself by arguing for the flat earth theory. I never for a second believed it to be true. I simply found it entertaining to frustrate people with stupid opinions. I dont know why I found this entertaining, and I dont know why I changed when I got older. Perhaps I hadn't fully developed my empathy at that young age, so I didn't see frustration in others as something bad. But this is just speculation. The only thing I know for certain is what I actually did, which was to pretend to hold stupid opinions.

So you'd only do this to argue with others. I presume you wouldn't go to Flat Earth forums to exchange thoughts with other flat earthers??

Lost of people do that. I suspect that half of the "zomg look at these stupid flat earthers!!11" images on reddit and such is basically one troll posting something outlandish and then another troll replying with something slightly more outlandish. Also see the history of trolls on e.g. Conservapedia and such.

It’s a generational thing. Thanks to social media, zoomers and boomers see the internet as an extension of real life. That plus years of extremely heavy-handed moderation being the norm, and they literally don’t comprehend that somebody might deliberately misrepresent themselves online.

This is an old-school view of the internet. The reality now is that the Internet is a pressure valve for various groups of people expressing perceived grievances they feel are being inflicted upon them by a nameless entity. Of course people say things in jest, but the neoreactionary movement isn't just a huge ironic troll and it has roots on certain image boards.

The "head in the sand" approach doesn't work here.

That’s a load of nonsense that smacks of “I’m really smart and enlightened and everyone else is dumb and incapable of rational thought.”

The idea that all of these people are “just harmless trolls” is unsupportable nonsense. It’s wild how many people want to jump to the defense of these morally repugnant people, though.

The naive idea that a layer of irony is 100% insulating is the issue. I'm glad that you stopped before it stuck.

But I refer you to "Popehat's law of goats". He who spams racist garbage...

Is there a law for people that nonsensically repeat stuff they read once in a comment online?

People have forgotten the age-old 4chan wisdom "Don't feed the trolls"

That didn't start with 4chan, it ... wait a minute. ;) Well played, sir.