1) The blog post of yours which attracted such vitriol was entitled "Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees"; you aren't using a conciliatory tone and it seems unfair to expect one in response.
2) Practically all the comments I read on here are more civil than I see elsewhere on the web.
3) In pw0ncakes original post there were a lot of measured statements (for instance Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.) which you appear to have disregarded.
4) Most of the vitriolic posts I've seen on HN have already been modded down into oblivion.
5) Although purely anecdotal I notice the civil air here and censor myself accordingly (in real life I tend far more towards "sarcastic douche" than I do here).
I wrote the first post. The title was too extreme. I acknowledged that and apologized for it. I agree that many of the comments were fair and said so in this post. This isn't my first post to get FU's. I can live with that. I still wonder whether my suggestions may help?
Well, for most of the folks that are regulars here, HN is still considered to have a pretty decent tone overall. There are tons and tons of counterexamples to your examples of "meanness" -- and, by the way, some of your examples of meanness seem to be conflated with angriness, and anger seems to be generally acceptable here.
The rest of your post comes off as licking your wounds over the response to your last article. That, or, more cynically, attempting to get the greatest possible mileage out of your job hoppers post.
And ... don't you think maybe that blogging about HN is the silliest waste of time? Out of all the possible subjects out there, and all of the possible insights to be discovered ... blogging about some forum somewhere is it?
Your first six sentences tell us that you were mistaken, that the problem isn't as big as you realized, and that you are partly to blame. That is: you admit that you have grossly exaggerated the problem of incivility on HN.
How, I ask, are your suggestions to help when there is no problem to solve?
I don't really see that there's a problem with incivility on HN.
Of your suggestions I only take issue with the first; if I had to post with my full name I'd leave. I've already got Facebook/Twitter/blogging if I want to publish something on the web with my real name.
I'm also not sure how easy it would be to enforce.
On a side note I usually really enjoy your blog. So, you know, thanks in general.
It's funny -- I was reaching for a phrase to describe your post, remembered reading the phrase grinfucker on a blog post linked here, searched, and it's your blog! Small world. It's not quite the phrase I need, but I'd like to repurpose it.
So Mark, the deal is simple -- your post was about grinfucking employees, trying to convince us that a behaving in a way almost exclusively in employers' interests is actually in employees' interests. So, you know, say whatever you want to whoever you want, it's your reputation. But when you get called on it, even in language with naughty words, sack up. And frankly, I responded exactly the way I would in person -- I don't like it when people try to sell me a line.
1) The blog post of yours which attracted such vitriol was entitled "Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees"; you aren't using a conciliatory tone and it seems unfair to expect one in response.
2) Practically all the comments I read on here are more civil than I see elsewhere on the web.
3) In pw0ncakes original post there were a lot of measured statements (for instance Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.) which you appear to have disregarded.
4) Most of the vitriolic posts I've seen on HN have already been modded down into oblivion.
5) Although purely anecdotal I notice the civil air here and censor myself accordingly (in real life I tend far more towards "sarcastic douche" than I do here).