I asked a straightforward, sincere question and then, after being inexplicably downvoted, elaborated further.
Then THAT was downvoted, with no answer to the original question or excuse for the attacks. That kind of infantile behavior brings down the site and should be called out, which is exactly what I did.
I'm not going to pussyfoot around assholes who try to bury other users' questions or comments for no reason. Why don't you ask THOSE people why they're attacking other users?
See above where the OP eventually answered the question I asked in a totally civil and helpful manner, and all is good. I realize that moderating a Web site is a huge job; but if you're going to actually look at individual cases, go after the meddling douchebags, not the guy simply asking for clarification.
Of course—but other people breaking the rules doesn't make it ok for you to do so, right? You broke them noticeably worse than any other comment in this thread (at least that I saw), and you did it like 4 or 5 times, which is a ton. So regardless of how this spat got started, or how right your view is, your account was certainly the one which had behaved the worst by the time it was over. Blaming the community / downvoters / "Redditards" for this isn't helpful.
The basic trouble here is that when you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) get in a tangle of disagreement with someone else, the odds that you'll feel like they are an "asshole", or "meddling douchebag", etc., get much higher.
Such perceptions are unreliable because they're mostly a byproduct of getting into an activated state, which is what happens when we get into an argument. We all know this experience, and we all feel it.
These feelings have a degrading effect on conversation if we act on them, so the basic idea of HN, as set out in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, is not to act on them. This takes conscious effort, but it's work we all have to do if HN is to have any chance of being interesting.
(Online arguments are bad for this because we have next to no information about each other - all we have are little globs of text that usually don't communicate intent.)
This is the root of most conflicts on HN, including the current one. You perceived your post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696161 as a "straightforward, sincere question" - but it doesn't read that way to me, and I'm sure not to many others either. "What's your point?" is typically a marker of hostility in conversation—it signals an adversarial intention. When you ask "what's your point?", especially if you ask it brusquely, the implication is that you don't think the other person actually has much of a point at all.
If you didn't want your question to be perceived that way, you would have needed to add disambiguating information; or, more likely, phrased it some other way than "What's your point?" Instead, though, when the other commenter answered your question, you pounced on them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37698914) in a way that, to me at least, seemed to confirm that you were being aggressive in the first place.
I hope this comes across as helpful and not annoying because I can see it either way!
Then THAT was downvoted, with no answer to the original question or excuse for the attacks. That kind of infantile behavior brings down the site and should be called out, which is exactly what I did.
I'm not going to pussyfoot around assholes who try to bury other users' questions or comments for no reason. Why don't you ask THOSE people why they're attacking other users?
See above where the OP eventually answered the question I asked in a totally civil and helpful manner, and all is good. I realize that moderating a Web site is a huge job; but if you're going to actually look at individual cases, go after the meddling douchebags, not the guy simply asking for clarification.