Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately your comment is doing the very thing you're complaining about. Worse, because of the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), it got upvoted to the top of the thread, choking out all good discussion. This isn't the way to make HN better!

I'm going to mark it off topic now, which will downweight it. In the meantime, please review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They ask you to contact us at hn@ycombinator.com if you want to raise a question like this. They also ask you not to be snarky.

The core value of this site is intellectual curiosity, and divisive meta comments are not in that spirit. If other people are posting tediously and offtopically, the solution is definitely not to post tedious and offtopic comments with an oppositional vector. I know it's tempting, but it makes the threads worse. The solution is to post more comments in the spirit of curiosity, or (failing that) not to post.

>Worse, because of the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), it got upvoted to the top of the thread, choking out all good discussion.

You don't it has something to do with people being fed up with almost every other programming language thread getting spammed by low quality "meta" post about a certain language superiority which are irrelevant to the discussion?

You guys don't have to convince me—I'm aware of the problem. The question is what's the solution. Creating a mirror image of the problem and upvoting that to the top of the thread is obviously not the solution.

Sure. But you have just proven with my post that you can push such content to the bottom of the thread. Why don't you simply do the same with those comments? If its to much work for you personally, maybe add something like a flag button but call it irrelevant button and posts that get too many irrelevant flags get pushed down to the bottom.

They can, and they do. You need to email them about specific instances, and they decide on a case-by-case basis. Meta complaints aren’t actionable. And there’s already an irrelevant flag: it’s called a downvote.

I don’t believe that’s contrarian dynamic. I think that’s the fact that when applied in large doses, online evangelism is indistinguishable from spam.

Have no idea how to solve that. I have never moderated online communities and that’s not my area of expertise.

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