Hi dang, I'm new here so I'd appreciate clarification.
Someone defending this privacy debacle on Hacker News is a Google employee on the Chrome team and was a business cofounder with the Stanford collaborator. That person not only failed to identify how very close they are to the topic, but also phrased their comment in a way that falsely represented distance from the topic. It seems to me essential for understanding their misleading comment to be aware of the factual context.
I thought I had phrased this factual correction in a way that was neutral and not a personal attack. My assumption was that the commenter may have violated Hacker News guidelines by being so misleading. What did I do wrong?
As for the downvotes, I see that I should have emailed you rather than adding a note in the comment. Nonetheless, could you see what's going on?
The commenter publicly identifies themselves in their HN profile and you're using that to attack them. It's completely backwards to say they've misrepresented anything. The essential thing is to assume good faith and not go on weird innuendo-laden witch-hunts.
It's a tough thing to balance, but generally, bringing in someone's personal details as ammunition in an internet argument is not ok on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). I'm not saying those are never relevant, but the default impact of doing this is to poison discussion so badly that the default bias has to be "don't do it". Certainly you should not be doing it as part of a flamewar post, which your comments in this thread have been. We want curious conversation here, not people cross examining each other.
I'm not disagreeing with you about the underlying issue—there's an argument to be made that the kind of "publishing" that Google/Chrome does here is is really a way of obscuring it from the majority of users, and so on. HN commenters are certainly welcome to make that kind of argument. But we need you to err on the side of not posting in the flamewar style. If I see a commenter posting in the flamewar style and then also bringing in someone's personal details as ammunition, it's no longer a tough-thing-to-balance, it's just out of line.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Someone defending this privacy debacle on Hacker News is a Google employee on the Chrome team and was a business cofounder with the Stanford collaborator. That person not only failed to identify how very close they are to the topic, but also phrased their comment in a way that falsely represented distance from the topic. It seems to me essential for understanding their misleading comment to be aware of the factual context.
I thought I had phrased this factual correction in a way that was neutral and not a personal attack. My assumption was that the commenter may have violated Hacker News guidelines by being so misleading. What did I do wrong?
As for the downvotes, I see that I should have emailed you rather than adding a note in the comment. Nonetheless, could you see what's going on?