Haha, so would I. I think I'd instantly suspect I've fucked up in some dramatic way. But HN is usually civility > truth. The community values politeness over correctness.

Useful to know that characteristic. I use a personal user-moderation tool built by a friend to remove these people from comments. I actually really like these threads since it lets me identify people with lower thresholds for truth and lower thresholds for what they'll amplify as truth.

You can't downvote replies to your own comments, so it's other people reading the insults and (correctly) downvoting them.

Looking at his comments I see insults coming 3 hours after his original comments were voted down. Apparently, being civil did not worked out for him either.