What comes across as harsh to me: down voting discussion posts because they're accidental duplicates/don't fit some idea of what a discussion post is supposed to be, a lot of down voting that goes on in general, unbridled or curt disagreement (like grognor's response to my post. You saw him cursing and yelling, right? I made this post because I thought the less wrong community could use optimization on the topics I wrote about, not because I wanted to antagonize anyone.)

PM'd response. General agreement with John below (which I didn't see until just now).