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Comment by taylorfinley | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a lot of people posting in this thread would benefit from reading Dang's post [0] from a few days ago about how shallow cryptocurrency discussions tend to be on HN and how we should all aim for a better level of discourse.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27497207

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Maybe it's because Bitcoin is pretty shallow topic on the technical side?

At this stage all the interesting aspects of Bitcoin are economic, political or philosophical rather than technical, especially since most of the latter has been discussed to death.

The original idea of blockchains might be simple(shallow) but it is still technically a very deep and interesting topic. Do you think proof of stake is the ultimate invention which resolves all current and future trust and scaling issues? Do you think the current implantation of smart contracts is the epitome of engineering? There isn't even (to my knowledge) a blockchain which enables a smart marketplace for compute time. (The computecoins I investigated fell very short of the promise of being a serverless AWS competitor).

Is there a term for this kind of "shallow" discussions/responses? E.g. if headline is about X but in the vicinity of Y the thread gets filled with generic comments about Y that have nothing to do with X.

It's obviously not exclusive to HN. I keep seeing it on reddit all the time and it's really tiring.

> E.g. if headline is about X but in the vicinity of Y the thread gets filled with generic comments about Y that have nothing to do with X

Exactly! I created an ASK HN a while back on this. It received a lot of feedback. It appears many long-time HN readers are tired of it.

You can see it here; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287700

It’s sort of like “topic drift” except that it’s closer to the topic, broadly defined. (Ironically, this side conversation is also topic drift, of the meta variety.)

I just call it appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Bike-shedding isn't binary, it's a continuum. Shallow discussions are a result of audience size and loss of focus.

Dang has had to post that admonition so many times the past few weeks, he really out to just auto-pin it at the top of the main page. Make it “Readme First” FAQ thread or something.

Since HN runs on its own software, it could literally enforce a "read me first" before posting requirement. For certain keywords in the title that might be an interesting way to influence discussion style (and keep it good over time).

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