I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said. While it is certainly the case that one can catch more flies with honey, I think we'd all rather be people who digest the message instead of disregarding it because we don't like how it was delivered to us. This isn't about textfile's delivery, but that it's useless bordering on childish to take a response from an author and respond simply with "I don't like your tone."
> I think we'd all rather be people who digest the message instead of disregarding it because we don't like how it was delivered to us.
That would be good, yes. We should all try to be like that. However, HN has guidelines as well, and I'm pretty sure that textfile's post violated some of them. And the way HN maintains it's status as the kind of place where we care about the message is partly by discouraging statements that needlessly distract with an offensive tone.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the guidelines only seem to state:
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
I guess this is the point where we'd be arguing about taste, but it seems to me that while textfile's comment was clearly negative, it was well constructed and well thought out. Not to mention it was in the _exact_ same tone as the article he'd written years ago that the conversation was about. In this case we should be very careful not to immediately jump on people being upset or negative. It's a powerful tool that, in this case, is being used wisely. I think a bruised sensibility here and there is a worthwhile risk in the name of maintaining a network like HN that accepts dissent and spirited disagreement.
As a slight tangent, in reading the guidelines I found that more than an attempt to tone-police, they are an attempt to lower the noise:signal ratio. The reason I feel that this discussion is important is because it's the reply, not textfile's response, that adds noise to the discussion even if you feel targeted by the authors response.
