So Squashed disagrees with the people who flamed out against him, and I'm certain he believes what he's writing, but don't see it as him trolling. Rather, it's him writing how he feels without thinking about who's going to read it. I'm certain he didn't expect Hacker News picking on him, and so didn't make an attempt to round out his writing and make his ideas balanced.

He has that right. Since when do bloggers have to write for any audience other than themselves?

I think we're a mature enough community, however, to learn not to get ourselves enraged over one man's personal blog, and to let him keep to his own circle. We can just not upvote the things he writes that we decide offend us.

It would be a shame if the shrinking world led to alienation and hatred rather than to communities selective enough not to start flamewars with all the other ones.

I hadn't actually expected a whole lot of people to read it. (No, I'm not doing anything to promote the site. Some of the ... less gracious than usual comments tipped me off that something was up, and Google Analytics suggested I look at ycombinator to figure out why the heck it had increased my monthly traffic by 900%.)

The big regret? I was reworking the layout. Because I suck at CSS, this takes a few days. Normally it's not a big deal. There may be forty or fifty non-Dashboard visitors. When traffic spikes at the same time as the layout is unprecedentedly ugly, that's something to be ashamed of. I'm surprised anybody even read the article. I would have been tempted to comment, "D00d, ur site is uglier than ur m0m. tl/dr."

Worse, it's astonishing to see how many people here haven't bothered to read his post on entitlement, the one that "angered techno-libertarians", before flaming him on HN.