Please don't go after someone about the details of their family story. There's enough heartache already.

I will respect this moderation decision, but I think, in context, it seems to indicate an approach that is ultimately detrimental to the quality of discussion on HN.

If someone is using a personal story with blaming statements as a means to make commentary about a more general topic of discussion, either the appropriateness of the blaming statements given the narrative must be just as subject to challenge as it would be if the narrative were a third-party news story and the whole style of argument of using such stories in a discussion needs to be viewed as out of bounds, otherwise you've created a specially privileged argument style for which only silence or agreement is allowed.

I largely agree, except it's easy to turn the topic back to the argument at hand. You just make statements about that, rather than about specific individuals, even though the other commenter did the latter. By commenting explicitly about the general and only implicitly about the personal, you convey respect and leave space for the other. It's different when the personal details are from your own life—relevant personal experience is fine.

We need this for discussion quality because challenging someone on their intimate personal details typically makes them feel wounded where it already hurt, prompting a defensive attack and a flamewar. Also, because we can't know from internet comments what was really going on in someone's life, it's more intellectually honest.

There are other things one can do to signal that someone is not being attacked. You can rephrase a statement as a neutral question. You can lead with "In my experience," making the statement about yourself. You can say "Of course I can't judge what was going on in your situation, but" and return to a general case.

I agree with you that when someone makes blaming personal statements as if they had general force in an argument, most of us immediately sense that something's off. But such statements come from pain and pain never responds to argument, only acknowledgement.

You're a fine HN commenter and I think you know all this already, but maybe the above will help clarify something for others.

It's just bad writing. There's a way to make the point you're trying to make without directly confronting someone about their childhood and their parents. "Well actually" is a super useful, easy way to make points on a message board, but there are things we should be extra carefully not to well-actually.

So because my mother cheated on him it's his fault for leaving...get a grip.

If my father had cheated on my mother I'm assuming it would still be his fault if she left him; that seems to be the gist of what you're getting at.

Once a cheater, always a cheater. We grew up poor because my mother cheated, not because of my father leaving.

And we grew up poor because my mother relied entirely upon my father for financial support and negated that benefit by cheating.

> So because my mother cheated on him it's his fault for leaving

No, independently of your mother cheating on him, it's his fault for refusing to uphold his legal obligation to materially support his children.

Leaving the spouse is not the issue. (Leaving the children may be an issue, but to the extent it is it is at a minimum mitigated by fulfilling the legal support obligations a parent who is not raising their children has to those children.)

> If my father had cheated on my mother I'm assuming it would still be his fault if she left him

Whoever's fault leaving is, it would be his fault if he chose to refuse to meet his legal obligation to support his children.

> We grew up poor because my mother cheated, not because of my father leaving.

From your own description, the poverty was at least in large part because your father refused to pay legally-required child support after leaving you and your mother. Assuming that there was not a custody contest that you omitted in which your mother was awarded full custody, leaving children is not necessary with leaving their mother, however justified the latter is, and in any case, neither requires being a deadbeat on child support.