Comment by dang

> Aren't we all adults here on this site who should be able to handle some pushback?

Sadly not. I'm tempted to say "most adults aren't adults", but the actual dynamics are more what dmos62 described.

Let's say most of us are adults most of the time, but that gap between "most" and "all" is, given a large-enough population, more than enough to ruin every thread if care isn't taken to avoid this.

Edit: one factor that often goes unappreciated is the size of the community. Small, cohesive communities can support more robust (or even aggressive) styles of interaction—especially when people have other things in common that unite them. In the past I've often compared this to rugby teams [1] that beat the crap out of each other and then go to the pub together; or literary or comedy communities where the art of insulting each other is part of the fun. These dynamics break down completely in a context like HN, where the group size is orders of magnitude larger and the bonds holding people together are super weak, if they exist at all.

It's not that those other styles of communication are bad or wrong—they're great! in contexts where they don't cause people to come to blows—but they're not good here, because the context can't support them. In the current context—the large, anonymous, public internet forum—the cost of keeping the community going is a certain blandness [2] of communication. I'm not fond of that either, but one can't wish these tradeoffs away.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...