My entire career on tech is thanks to my comments at the bottom of TechCrunch articles in the early 2010s (and I did hang out with the TechCrunch writers once I moved to SF). That was more a time where trolling in comment sections on blogs was more understood to be in good fun.
Comment culture died starting in 2016, as the internet as a whole became more polarized and making maliciously edgy is both commonplace and rewarded. Hacker News is an outlier in that aspect as it avoided that fate.
replies(2):