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Comment by drlisp | Hacker News Reader

This level of ass kissing makes me want to puke.

I have to agree, actually. More to the point, this submission violates both the written and unspoken rules of submissions here: "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something", and the unspoken rule that content-less submissions are generally frowned upon.

This is something that could have been equally effective as a brief email to pg. As the current top-ranked post here, it's kind of ... masturbatory.

Agreed as well; HN has a "fourth wall" in a sense - meta posts are discouraged where possible.

This is the very definition of a meta post (and from a personal perspective I dislike the fawning tone too)

I up voted you because you're correct. It would have easily sufficed as an email to PG.

However, the impact of appreciating something and having communal pooling of appreciation affirms the intent. I want HN to remain what it is and I did not want to be "just another email" in PG's inbox; I suppose by submitting this in the first place I contributed to "what HN is not" but I do still feel that my submission was appropriate in the sense that my intent was an intelligent choice and not a "masturbatory" choice.

However, the impact of appreciating something and having communal pooling of appreciation affirms the intent ...

While I also like the same HN features you like, I didn't upvote your post because it just felt too obsequious.

I think there is a defined line between obsequiousness and appreciation. I feel the tone of my post actually leaned on the side of appreciation than it did "obedient or servile". I suppose that any sort of "Thank you" statement could be taken for fawning, particularly in a community that values a karmic rating system; as I said in my reply above, I still think my post was submitted with a clear and intelligent choice.

And I guess a lot of folks agreed with you, as your post is at 251 points and counting.

> However, the impact of appreciating something and having communal pooling of appreciation affirms the intent. I want HN to remain what it is and I did not want to be "just another email" in PG's inbox

This is an incredibly convoluted explanation of what can simply be called grandstanding. I appreciate your intent, but please - we all want HN to remain what it is. If your intent was to thank pg, email him. If your intent was to communicate your want for HN to stay the same - do so when there is some threat to what we hold valuable. Otherwise: post intelligent replies, downvote trolls and submit the occasional illuminating article. Threads like this (and others like it) do no good for any of your stated aims.

It's not the single odd submission that comes up that is really what offends, it's more of the slippery slope it invites that historically can overwhelm the quality of popular websites. Take the frequency of outlier commentary and multiply it by the internet and you get trouble.

It can be curbed with a culture of self moderation, it can be curbed with enforced rules and other barriers, a good early example of this is Something Awful's combination of introducing a registration fee along with a reputation for banning users who posted crap. It's survived through the years and I'd venture this was a factor.

But the point is if your site becomes highly popular there will always be the risk of drowning under a low signal:noise ratio. Hence the sensitivity to posts like this here because <asskissing>the HN crowd as a whole has a lot of experience with this phenomenom</asskissing>.

They think the community is great but HNers aren't just saying it's great, they are saying why. I see this as inductive form of learning, we are trying to ascertain what goes into making an excellent community.

> This is something that could have been equally effective as a brief email to pg. As the current top-ranked post here, it's kind of ... masturbatory.

Disagree - I think this thread will be far more well-read than the site guidelines by new members and will show them why we love this place and why we want to preserve it.

Nobody wants a post like on the frong page every week, but once per six months or a year is probably good for the community.

I don't know what's worse--meta-posts about how HN is dying, or self-congratulatory meta-posts like this. But if you have one, it helps to balance it out with the other.

I think the fact that my comment didnt get downmodded out of existence shows how cool HN is. Nonetheless, the forum shouldnt (routinely?) engage in self-congradulatory homages to PG.

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