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Comment by jholloway7 | Hacker News Reader

The tone of his comment seems to me he's just frustrated a community of programmers took the conversation down the path of debating the merits of recommendation systems rather than exploring the more general applicability of the algorithm in other problem spaces.

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I agree with him. Half the time you'll enter an HN discussion and the most upvoted comment will an unrelated bikeshedding discussion.

Usually one of these:

- "I love the idea but can we talk about how the website doesn't look good when CSS is disabled?"

- "25MB of JavaScript? Really? You know, websites used to..."

- "This website is impossible to read because the contrast ratio is too low and I am personally offended."

- "Did anyone else get an ad from this news website? Why does advertising exist?"

- "An obscure open source project uses the same name as this unrelated business. Have you no shame?"

- "The website looks weird on mobile, by which I mean my rooted Android phone running Opera."

- "The text is too big."

- "The text is too small."

When did "comment" transition into "thought-provoking well-defended essay"? Is there no water cooler talk on the internet anymore? I find interesting tidbits and interesting tangents here on HN and I appreciate it all!

I think the "most upvoted comment" part is important here. Tangents are indeed good to have, but I don't think they should occupy the most visible parts of the comment section.

OMG this is so true. Should be a HN bingo.

That is in fact why the mods boot many of the most-upvoted comments to the bottom of the thread. I think it’s incorrect to say that half the time you’ll see such comments at the top.

Good part is that they visit the link at all.

Contrast ratio is an accessibility issue. One of these things is not like the other.

Very true. But all the same, when I see an article with about 25 comments, click on it, and see that the text has poor contrast, I know exactly what all those comments are going to be saying. Probably nothing about the article at all. The first comment will be about how the site is hard to read - which is a very legitimate complaint. And then the next 24 will be complaining about the design of every other random website under the sun.

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