Easy solution: don't care so much. There's so much velocity now that your posts will soon be buried unlikely ever to be seen again.
hn is a fun and uplifting place to come on break. The moment anything about it turns negative for you, log off, go code something, and come back tomorrow. We start over every day.
I think you're on to something here. The core of this is probably that HN is different things to different people. You see it as a place to come on a break, and then it wouldn't matter much to you whether or not you got 'misrepresented' somehow. In this case it wasn't that important, but in the more general case to have your words changed is not good, especially without a trace that that is what happened.
I see HN as a completely different place than you do. I see it as a place to meet people that are interested in the same sort of thing that I'm interested in (at least I hope so), which means that if I were to be misrepresented somehow by some anonymous editor that it would make a huge difference to me.
When you post online, you're saying something with your name. It's tied to you and who you are as a figure online.
I've had things I posted on HN come back to bite me in the ass, not in large ways but in ways that indicate people are willing to read through a person's posts to find more about them. That's why I no longer list any personal details in my profile. It's a shame, because I don't get the lengthy email discussions that used to follow threads, but I don't want any ties between this and anything else I've done.
I've felt before like deleting this account and its posts along with it; I regret that there's no option for me to do so.
From what I've seen HN is more debate oriented than 'fun and uplifting' and it's probably natural that people care about how they are represented. I think the easy solution is to write a couple of lines of code, instead of having people stop caring. It's no secret that this site is very underdeveloped. Probably deliberate, but not without its consequences.
Comments
Easy solution: don't care so much. There's so much velocity now that your posts will soon be buried unlikely ever to be seen again.
hn is a fun and uplifting place to come on break. The moment anything about it turns negative for you, log off, go code something, and come back tomorrow. We start over every day.
I think you're on to something here. The core of this is probably that HN is different things to different people. You see it as a place to come on a break, and then it wouldn't matter much to you whether or not you got 'misrepresented' somehow. In this case it wasn't that important, but in the more general case to have your words changed is not good, especially without a trace that that is what happened.
I see HN as a completely different place than you do. I see it as a place to meet people that are interested in the same sort of thing that I'm interested in (at least I hope so), which means that if I were to be misrepresented somehow by some anonymous editor that it would make a huge difference to me.
When you post online, you're saying something with your name. It's tied to you and who you are as a figure online.
I've had things I posted on HN come back to bite me in the ass, not in large ways but in ways that indicate people are willing to read through a person's posts to find more about them. That's why I no longer list any personal details in my profile. It's a shame, because I don't get the lengthy email discussions that used to follow threads, but I don't want any ties between this and anything else I've done.
I've felt before like deleting this account and its posts along with it; I regret that there's no option for me to do so.
From what I've seen HN is more debate oriented than 'fun and uplifting' and it's probably natural that people care about how they are represented. I think the easy solution is to write a couple of lines of code, instead of having people stop caring. It's no secret that this site is very underdeveloped. Probably deliberate, but not without its consequences.