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What makes side B a "fact checker"? How can you identify them as such?

The real problem is that for pretty much any claim I can find you a tweet saying it was false. That doesn't help. We're into relative assessments of credibility by origin here. It looks like the original tweet author has retracted, which is pretty convincing.




When someone says:

> Apple takes back from the developer exactly what they gave the developer. This has been verified by a number of people, and this submission is just farcically wrong. How is this nonsense front page on HN? Is this community this clueless?

This is a pretty harsh opposition. Not a small thing to gloss over. Why was it downvoted?


Probably because it's harsh opposition.

Yes, downvotes are unexplained, and we're reduced to mind-reading, but what I reckon is that the following would have done much better:

"Apple takes back from the developer exactly what they gave the developer. This has been verified by a number of people"

.. especially with a link to said verification and the bona fides of the verifiers.

The gold standard would be a link to a statement by Apple. Of course, simply being said by an official source doesn't make it true either!


Here is what I fundamentally don’t understand. You have one guy make an unfounded, yet emotionally strong claims (every developer hates the appstore) and now his word in written in stone.

To refute him, you need multiple people to show that he’s wrong, a written statement from Apple and consignment from the Queen of England. This seems broken


When an account calling itself "hn_check" posts a series of comments like these they're going to get downvotes across most of their comments:

"Every clown who repeated this and argued the unfairness of it, like rattray here -- delete your accounts."

"rattray is intentionally spreading hilariously dumb misinformation to make HN look like a bunch of stupid assholes."

"This place is a den of absolute idiots, time and time again. And when it is realized it goes to auto-dead time. Absolutely fucking embarrassing for anyone who is proud of their association with this shithole of stupidity."

"Don't ever change your adorable ignorance, HN. It's such a laugh.

And this will be auto-dead. I was spot on and completely right and got pummeled down by the imbeciles of this cesspool. Hilarious. "


Hm, if I got a comment like this in reply to mine, I would double-check my facts before rushing to the downvote button.


Haha, so would I. I think I'd instantly suspect I've fucked up in some dramatic way. But HN is usually civility > truth. The community values politeness over correctness.

Useful to know that characteristic. I use a personal user-moderation tool built by a friend to remove these people from comments. I actually really like these threads since it lets me identify people with lower thresholds for truth and lower thresholds for what they'll amplify as truth.


You can't downvote replies to your own comments, so it's other people reading the insults and (correctly) downvoting them.


Looking at his comments I see insults coming 3 hours after his original comments were voted down. Apparently, being civil did not worked out for him either.




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