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> Anyway this is par for the course of Hacker News. The troll post always is highest ranked.

:( HN is the platform on the net where you will read "RSS should be used more" and "Thanks Dave Winer for this great tech" most often. And here you have a comment of someone with no history of trolling (according to his most recent posts at least) who made himself very small ("I was an idiot") and apologized to you, and you insult not only him, but the whole platform.

Dave, you don't know me, but a lot of people here read you. And so many of the developers here build software with technology you like (i.e. I implemented a RSS feed for my blog software, a feed reader [with opml import!], a rss polling and pushing infrastructure, and a RSS focused SaaS pipes revival site) and share some of your ideals. Is it really necessary to be antagonistic to all of us? How is this a winning strategy?

And assume for a moment latchkeys story is genuine. You don't remember it, but so what, it was 25 years ago and you said yourself you had lots of bad interactions at that time. I'd be very surprised if some idiot kid acting badly is something you would remember. Your reaction now to his public apology would be devastating.

From your second comment:

> His memory of me, a guy who he says created software that he used and liked, is the time he treated me like an object.

To me it reads like he treated you like one of his friends, which obviously was a bad idea if you have a different age and cultural background, besides not sharing this strange feeling of knowing someone because you read his blogs for years, who of course never realized you exist.



Spot on, except the devastating part. I am not surprised by his response and I'm old enough now to just shrug it off.

My story was absolutely genuine and is in response to his request for stories...

"I wonder what it looked like from the other side of the net connection."


That's good to hear :)


I stopped coming here a long time ago because trolls dominate. These days we understand why and how that happens, and HN is wide open to that kind of abuse, with no moderation tools.

So what changed, if it's true that now it's a place where people are respectful of other people? And where are those comments in this thread (spoiler: they're at the bottom of the list).

Anyway PLEASE let me know when the tech I have participated in is discussed here and if there's some way I can help.

For example, I'm getting a new version of the XML-RPC website ready, based on a new JavaScript implementation. A lot of people still use XML-RPC, after scripting.com it's my most popular site.

My email address is dave@scripting.com.

I'm always shipping new projects on GitHub. I have a new one I'm working on that I'm really excited about. ;-)

https://github.com/scripting?tab=repositories

If Hacker News is a good venue then I want to participate. I'm skeptical but will try to keep an open mind.


Oh, but there is not no moderation. There is a moderator team, a system for shadowbanning is in place, and posts get downvoted or flagged. We just still seem to disagree whether the comment here was disrespectful or not.

XML-RPC is indeed something used in the wild, and something I have contact with via blog software. In my case for remote editors and pingbacks basically.

For the discussions, I'm gonna send you a mail :)




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