So I think I understand what hypfer's getting at, but I personally would never classify this sort of thing even remotely as "trolling".

@hypfer I'm curious, can you understand / identify with at least some of what I'm sharing below?:

A lot of people (likely near 100% of people) have their own internal beliefs about the world and they are largely commenting primarily to validate that belief (I am literally doing it with this comment). Like you often can see both what the person objectively wrote but then also get a feeling for some internal belief that motivated this specific comment.

And naturally, people are emotionally attached to their internal beliefs. And so sometimes comments are less a sharing of ideas and more a factually coded emotional rationalization of their internal beliefs. And when you read a comment like this that goes against one of your own beliefs, it may feel like an attack.

To me the distinction though is the motivation of the person on the other side. My interpretation is that true trolls have a motivation to incite emotions whereas most other people simply are trying to validate their own beliefs, despite potentially doing it in a way that is not emotionally palatable to all perspectives.

Separately, for you (hypfer), do you agree that there could be some amount of "hostile attribution bias" here? I saw this term while searching about this topic and to me it would explain both your perspective of feeling personally attacked and others perspective of feeling like that's actually not at all what's happening.

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether someone is a troll "just asking questions" or actually just asking that question. More so on HN than in most of the world, I mean.

It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.