The point is, it's irrelevant whether I personally have an issue with poaching or not. What if I sit here and say "Not only do I not have an issue with poaching, but I personally went on a rhino hunt last year and scored myself two kills"?
Your conversation is having effects on the site, and it's important to think about those effects. You probably feel the effects are positive. But angering all the meat eaters (which are numerous) changes nothing. The outcome before and after your thread is the same, except now a lot of people are unhappy. If you're not careful, your devil's advocate streak will come to an end, because (much to my dismay) unhappy people will email complaints about you to the people who run the site, and they'll go "Oh, yes, this is off-topic; in fact, they've been posting quite a lot of off-topic things." Then they'll press a button which either sinks your comments to the bottom, limits you from posting more than 5 comments every 3 hours, and other various unpleasant behavior modification techniques. I've experienced them all. If you want to experience them, then off-topic subthreads that make a lot of people unhappy is an excellent way.
I'll leave you to it. Perhaps you'll get lucky and fly under the radar now that HN is another order of magnitude larger. But your lucky streak won't last forever; sooner or later, if you keep calling people insufferable douchebags (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28984926) or leaving generic political comments about America (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28982669) or bringing up tangents about race (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28979634) or trying to imply that everyone who has a problem with poaching should also stop eating meat, well...
You clearly have a lot to offer conversations. For me, it helped to channel my intellectual curiosity side, rather than my "pointing out how terrible society is" side. It made me happier in the long run, too. Hopefully you'll have a long run.
Your conversation is having effects on the site, and it's important to think about those effects. You probably feel the effects are positive. But angering all the meat eaters (which are numerous) changes nothing. The outcome before and after your thread is the same, except now a lot of people are unhappy. If you're not careful, your devil's advocate streak will come to an end, because (much to my dismay) unhappy people will email complaints about you to the people who run the site, and they'll go "Oh, yes, this is off-topic; in fact, they've been posting quite a lot of off-topic things." Then they'll press a button which either sinks your comments to the bottom, limits you from posting more than 5 comments every 3 hours, and other various unpleasant behavior modification techniques. I've experienced them all. If you want to experience them, then off-topic subthreads that make a lot of people unhappy is an excellent way.
I'll leave you to it. Perhaps you'll get lucky and fly under the radar now that HN is another order of magnitude larger. But your lucky streak won't last forever; sooner or later, if you keep calling people insufferable douchebags (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28984926) or leaving generic political comments about America (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28982669) or bringing up tangents about race (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28979634) or trying to imply that everyone who has a problem with poaching should also stop eating meat, well...
You clearly have a lot to offer conversations. For me, it helped to channel my intellectual curiosity side, rather than my "pointing out how terrible society is" side. It made me happier in the long run, too. Hopefully you'll have a long run.