Where are those rules? Where the fuck can I see them? Who the fuck made them?
Edit: Ok, I can see the link on the first page - hadn't seen the announcement.
On the announcement: Where does it say anything about reducing the number of fucks in a post? It talks about gratuitous negativity. How does saying "Fuck bitcoin" or "Fuck money" involve gratuitous negativity? It's not directed at anyone.
Seriously, if this place becomes some sort of Political Correctness bubble where swearing is discouraged in this way, that's an amazing distortion of the hacker spirit.
Sam's article talks about not directing gratuitous negativity at people when you're arguing with them. That has very little correlation with your use of words like "fuck" or "shit". Seriously.
The OP wanted to express a point about money and about bitcoin. It was best expressed with the word "fuck". The word "forget" doesn't get it across to me at all. That has nothing to do with the person he was responding to.
Correct. That, plus not being gratuitously dismissive of others' work, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9314065 was. (I don't cite that to pick on a particular commenter; some users said they would find examples helpful and it's a random recent one.) Substantive, respectful criticism is of course fine and valuable.
The problem is that it's being used quite aggressively here, dismissing bitcoins, dismissing money, and being overly combative. After the second "fuck [whatever thing]" statement, it's already noticeable enough and an easy way to pinpoint an exact instance of combative or aggressive tone. I like the new rules about less negativity, so I thought I'd try to "enforce" them. Wrong word, remind people about them, instead.
By "gratuitous negativity" we're mostly talking about how community members treat each other and their work. It's ok to kick ideas around a bit harder. And certainly a few uses of "fuck" don't hurt. It looks to me like kang was just being enthusiastic.
That kind of thing can break the guidelines if someone overdoes it repeatedly and their comments add no new information or arguments. But that's not the case here.
It's natural for there to be a few glitches while the community works out how to interpret what "gratuitous negativity" means in practice, but as a hint, we're mostly talking about being mean to others and/or being glibly dismissive of their work. We're definitely not talking about bowdlerizing conversation. We'd hate that as much as most HN users would.