While obviously I don't agree with the comment you're responding to (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20813149), I wanted to ask you if there's a way I could have phrased the comment it was responding to to be less inflammatory. I didn't anticipate that it would provoke such responses, and I wonder if there's a way to avoid it other than just silence.
You are asking Dan, but answering from the bleachers: I think it's mostly just the length. If you write a short and direct comment that people are likely to disagree with, you invite short, direct and disagreeable answers. If instead your 'meatier' response to 'psychometry' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20813149) had been part of the original, I think the responses might have been higher quality as well. It's not that short and direct comments are inherently bad, just that as early responses they can set a tone that discourages productive conversation. In any case, I appreciate your opinions and would be disappointed if you revert to silence.
Sorry I didn't see this earlier; am traveling this week and less on top of things. Are you asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812948? I think the trouble was that it admits too many interpretations, some of which (e.g. "dumb ideological boilerplate") are provocative, and users have a strong tendency to leap to a provocative interpretation if one is open. Or rather, probably every possible interpretation of your comment lands with some readers, but the ones who hear the provocative interpretation have a stronger tendency be provoked into replying—often in a fashion that is nastier than the original perceived provocation, because they feel like you "started it".
Many readers are locked and loaded for such responses to begin with, and since firing back provides a certain release, they don't tend to scrutinize the text they're reacting to very closely to see if it really does say what they're reacting to, or what other interpretations there might be. The HN guidelines specifically ask users to do the latter ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."), but that requires a slower reflective process than is available in the locked-and-loaded case.
This is compatible with what nkurz said, because shorter comments admit of more interpretations. It also implies a mitigation that, in practice, seems to work: include disambiguating information to rule out provocative interpretations. The more provocative a possible interpretation is, the more flame retardant you probably need to pack with your message. This sucks, because it makes you responsible for deflecting things you don't mean, which can be a tedious and political way to communicate. In practice, though, if you really aren't issuing a provocation (e.g. dumb ideological boilerplate), it often suffices to share more of your thought process, especially anything unusual or unpredictable about it, and that tends to make for a more interesting comment too.
It's par for the course for internet libertarianism. They have a thirteen year old's YA-dystopian-fiction-novel understanding of how society works.