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Comment by allzeros | Hacker News Reader

I really, truly wish HN would moderate and remove comments about a link's medium. Every single post here has at least one person complaining about the layout of the source. Every time. It's exhausting. I hate it. It contributes absolutely nothing, and I don't know if anyone's noticed, but people keep using Twitter! Gasp! If you hate Twitter so much, reach out to the tweet author and ask them to publish elsewhere. If you hate Medium, e-mail the author and ask them to switch platforms. But dear God, can we please stop complaining about it in HN comments? Either read it or don't.

Please just stop.

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Then let me add that this is a particularly bad case.

I know there's a user called foone that has gotten posted to HN enough times that they explained why they use twitter to make posts instead of writing a blog (they have adhd, and they find it easier to write on twitter). Which is reasonable since there's an empathical justification. And I've read other twitter threads in the past, which were fine.

Usually, people just write out a paragraph but broken over multiple tweets. This is the first time that I've seen someone try and link other videos/posts/images which is somehow so much worse.

It's a valid point of discussion. What isn't is you actually complaining. You could take your own advice and write to Dang about the moderation?

You literally just repeated his own point, but about his comment.

If only nobody would write comments on HN we wouldn’t have this problem!

How on earth can this individual’s speech vex you to such an extent that you need it silenced?

It adds 0 to the conversation. It is very weird, almost borderline autistic behaviour...

90% of links, have some kind of: "doesn't work on my mobile... format sucks, i don't like the colors, etc... etc.." comment.

It is pure infantile/juvenile bikesheding and distracting from the point of the conversation/link that has nothing to do with formatting.

We could consider adding a guideline asking people not to post such things. The problem is that sometimes such comments are helpful for the owner of a site, who either shared their own work or happened to be on here when someone else did.

My guess is that's pretty unusual, and that if you looked at a sample of, like, 20 of them, in at least 19 cases whatever was being complained about would remain the case on the website in question, indicating that the site owner did not get value from them. Meanwhile: those comments really are a pox on the threads; it'd be better if users were in the habit of downvoting them to keep the top of the thread clear, which a guideline would accomplish.

Care to suggest a wording for it?

Discuss substance, not presentation, unless presentation is the topic of the story. Comments about web design and readability are off-topic. Advice for authors is best delivered through a polite private email.

Just to calibrate: would you say "this site breaks the back button fuck I fucking hate that" should be under this umbrella?

Extremely yes. Sites that break the back button aren't going to stop doing that because HN complains about it, right?

Ok, I added it. A brand new guideline is a rarity. We should have a ceremony.

I worded it more concretely: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances [etc]" I find that giving concrete examples and inviting the mind to generalize them works better than giving an abstract rule and inviting the mind to instantiate it. I learned this trick from spreadsheet development.

I was about to complain bitterly that the guidelines are now too long and there isn't a single one that can be taken out...but then I saw one that could be taken out, and I took it out. That was "Please submit the canonical URL. Avoid link shorteners." It's covered by "Please submit the original source." We added it a few years ago to try to convey that link shorteners are banned on HN, but it can be pushed out of the constitution and down into case law. It's the ones that aren't derivable from other guidelines that are hard to remove.

The list still feels too long to me. The longer it gets, the less people will take in, and I really want to avoid the mistake of accruing a big list of rules over time. They've grown like tree rings (and about as slowly) as we've learned about what feedback helps regulate the system. But the longer the list becomes, the more it starts to feel like a bureaucratic artifact rather than, let's say, a philosophical one, and that is out of sync with the intended spirit. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Devil's advocating here, because I agree more with your sentiment:

That comment has sparked a larger subthread specifically about Twitter as a medium, rather than the content of the post. This specific subthread is so popular, it's near the top of the page every time I refresh this post. So we could say it stifles discussion, also because people are prone to voting up a comment like that despite the fact that it's not really relevant to the post.

And that's why the [-] button is so awesome.

Squeaky wheels get the oil. Sorry dude...

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