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Re:Notes on Tajikistan by tptacek on Saturday June 22, 2024 @12:20PM (#40760132)
Just in case this is helpful (I saw this thread because I'm operantly conditioned to read Dan's comments to catch these essays he writes) --- you and I chatted a bunch up until about a month ago, when I sort of deliberately gave up on talking about Palestine on HN. In the intervening time until now, it looks like essentially all of your comments have been political.

I think there's, like, 2 things about that? First: the overwhelming majority of what the site talks about isn't politics, and you're basically not engaging with it. That's fine for some topics; like, if all you engaged with was woodworking or Russian literature, you'd be great. But the 2nd thing is that political threads tend inexorably to become toxic and alienating, in ways that mess up conversations about woodworking and Russian literature and LLMs and APL. People literally hold grudges from the political threads!

I think if you're going to exclusively comment on political threads, the bar is higher to stay assiduously within the guidelines, which basically means avoiding any kind of pejorative writing, even if it's oblique, about the commenters who disagree with you; write as if to a beloved but intractably wrong and somewhat thin-skinned uncle on an email thread just before Thanksgiving.

(Or just mix it up and back away from the political debates. I know that's hard; they're fun.)

This is just a guess, for what it's worth.

Re:Notes on Tajikistan by racional on Saturday June 22, 2024 @01:20PM (#40760559)
I think if you're going to exclusively comment on political threads, the bar is higher to stay assiduously within the guidelines, which basically means avoiding any kind of pejorative writing, even if it's oblique, about the commenters who disagree with you; write as if to a beloved but intractably wrong and somewhat thin-skinned uncle on an email thread just before Thanksgiving.

This is most excellent advice. Thanks for chiming in.