There are lots of places where people refer to the kinds of comments that show up on web message boards as, well, far from the epitome of rational, polite, interesting discussion. Maybe discussions on email mailing lists are the most common place where this happens.

I think a lot of us here are users both of Reddit and Hacker News, and that experience is why we don't want Hacker News to turn into Reddit. It's not that we're belittling Reddit's users, but that we don't like the kinds of discussions that occur on Reddit.

The comment at the top of this thread is a perfect example: instead of contributing to the discussion, its author thought it would be more worthwhile to express his disagreement with the subject of the article by using the word "fucking", without ever actually explaining why he disagreed. He succeeded in writing a funny comment (it got ten upvotes!) but not in writing anything worth reading.