People care about voting way too much.

It's worth noting that you rarely end up with more than -1 or -2 votes. Write a single popular comment and it more than makes up for it.

I'm not sure what your comment about "people linking to old comments" means. Either you stand by your comments or you don't.

Edit. The comment I replied was by the user "compare"[1] and said the following:

In this case, it was people linking to old comments, to try to make the attacks more personal, and attempting vote brigading. I wish we could ban most of the top active commenters on hacker news. They get controlling and territorial.

[1] https://hackernews.hn/user?id=compare

One could argue that the most valuable feedback for a writer is on comments that are rght on the boundary between their viewpoint and alternate viewpoints. Culturally, it would be more valuable if people replied with their reason for disagreement.

Downvotes are clearly intended for moderation (visibility change of font), but are easy to misuse for passive debate.

> I wish we could ban most of the top active commenters on hacker news.

Assuming I'm on it, let's see the rest of your list of HN'ers you'd like to see banned.

HN should remove the option to delete your post once someone's replied to it. Also show all versions of your comment, like facebook does.

Situation: someone accidentally copy-pastes personal data into a comment. Someone else replies, "you probably should remove that". The first person can no longer remove it.

I find it annoying when people delete posts as well, but there are valuable reasons to do it.

I'm guessing [1] is most of them?

[1] https://hackernews.hn/leaders

tptacek

Only because I disagree with his views on everything (besides crypto).

Just kidding. If it weren't for the tptaceks of internet, I'd have no reason to ever leave a comment.

If he was banned because some newbie (or anybody else) demanded it I'd happily join him in exile. Though I very highly doubt that would ever happen. And I'm at odds with Thomas on plenty of subjects, that doesn't mean there should be demands to squelch those that we disagree with.

I would not even want to see people banned for asking other people to be banned. It's just totally against the grain of the community. I read back some more through 'compare's' comments and he did indeed have a run-in with Thomas so you may be on to something there.

https://hackernews.hn/item?id=7493419

You really need to stop the personal attacks and trying to raise a downvote brigade against my comments, just because we disagreed about a law and culture topic.

I wish the site admins would place a clear written policy against these and other personal attacks next to every comment box.