[steve8918]

Please don't try to twist your dumb rant into some sort of free speech issue.

The multiple people telling you to shut up isn't because they are trying to squelch discussion on the topic. They are telling you to shut up because you, specifically, bring negative value to the discussion and you are responsible for decreasing the signal to noise ratio.

In your example about the dumb, drunken football fan yelling at the TV, the people in the bar are now starting to tell him to STFU because they want to watch the game and not have to listen to the useless, drunken ranting of someone with zero credibility.

[raganwald]

What? I don't agree at all. I wrote something in my personal blog on the Internet. That's the bar. If you want to tweet, or write something in on your blog, that's also the bar.

But this is a kind of club where I didn't post those writings. And when I have discussed them, I've been civil as is our rule here.

We have two ways of saying "This is noise, not signal." One is to downvote. The other, flagging, is reserved for special cases."Shut up!" is not one of those ways. And if you count, my words here on HN have over 100 votes.

If you don't like what I have to say, argue with it and/or vote on it. That's what we do here. This isn't Reddit.

[ynniv]

The core problem is that 100 more people on Hacker News think that your top comment is valuable, and further that you take this as justification that your viewpoint is supported by the community. As there is no way for folks to only participate in the HN that disagrees with your rants, folks are being negative. That's the only tool they have.

When you sell books on how CoffeeScript is great and then rant that people aren't solving difficult medical device issues, I wish that there was a version of Hacker News that did not include your comments. Maybe someone will make that.