I'm not trying to be a jerk and challenge your authority, just trying to get better because I legitimately don't know where I crossed the line. Can you be more specific about what I did wrong here? Because comparing the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to image hosting seems perfectly on theme for HN.

Ok, I'll (belatedly) try. From my perspective, you started off fine with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523182.

Already with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32524176, though, you started breaking the site guidelines by leading with "Do you think AWS is run as a public service?", which is obviously not what anyone thinks. That broke the site guideline that asks you not to be snarky, as well as this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." (The rest of that post seems fine.)

Things went further off the rails with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32524512. This is definitely a flamewar comment, in the tit-for-tat style, which we want to avoid here. When people lead with "What?" and/or start arguing about who said what and who's misrepresenting who, this is not curious conversation, it's irritable meta-argument. That's basically always off topic here. The thing to do when tempted to post like that is to just walk away. Let the other person "win"—the actual winner is the one who finds the freedom to walk away first.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32525065 is more of the same, although not in the tit-for-tat sequence. It's just not interesting or helpful to post complaints about being wrongly accused, misunderstood, etc. Again, it's not curious conversation, which is what we want here.

I realize the other commenter was provocative and also broke the rules (probably worse than you did), but from their perspective it's not hard to understand how you provoked them.

Commenters here need to follow the rules regardless of what anyone else does. It always feels like the other person started it and did worse, so ultimately all parties have to be ok with an "unfair" (i.e. one that feels unfair) outcome, or things just keep deteriorating.