You may have a good point, but this is a bad HN comment. For it to be a good HN comment you'd have to develop the point (1) in more detail, (2) with more explanation, and (3) without denunciatory rhetoric. If you were to do that, I'd be interested in reading it.
To post like this is against your interest because, to the extent that readers can tell what you're saying, they'll just be turned against it by the grandiosity and indignation. Those commodities are much too cheap on the internet.
Thank you for the feedback (and for all the moderation work). It can be hard to detach and focus on the “purely informational” substance of an argument, but you are right that that is pretty much always for the best. This is going to sound like such a HN cliche, but if there was a good way to convey emotion as independent metadata instead, I’d try to use that.
And to clarify my comment, I’m frustrated to see so much of our public discourse still rely on appeals to authority, even when we’re talking about claims that are fundamentally impossible to validate. Authority figures are proving to be nearly-as-bad at navigating these difficult topics as the rest of us, but it seems that to do any better, the public would need to understand the actual ideas being discussed, which seems a long way off (I don’t even hear this mentioned as a possible goal).
So for now we are left with a choice between trusting what is essentially an order of clerics, empowering another authority that won’t do much better (regular old politics), or mob rule. I have to go with the second option, but it is not much better than the others, at best.
To post like this is against your interest because, to the extent that readers can tell what you're saying, they'll just be turned against it by the grandiosity and indignation. Those commodities are much too cheap on the internet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html