Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

staticassertion

That's funny. I find HN far more annoying because of conversations like this. Instead of having good technical conversations it's almost always people critiquing things like the font that someone's using on their site, and for some insane reason it's voted up to the top. And here I am contributing to the problem by extending this stupid thread further.

I had to scroll down ~75% of this page, passing what seemed like many dozens of posts all saying the same useless shit about the format and not talking at all about the content.

And that got me to the next top post, which... is someone just unrolling it.

Thankfully, soon after, someone asks a legitimate question about the content. Nearly at the bottom.

The twitter thread on the other hand is concise and easy to scroll through. A couple of memes because someone's having fun telling their story seems relatively benign compared to the average HN comments section drivel.

No idea if you know this or not, but I use the thread collapse button judiciously to skip these long sidethreads (after reading the first few subcomments...)

Side note: I used to think I was down voting when I was collapsing the thread and I felt REALLY bad for doing it.

Note to Newbs: you can't dont vote until you hit 500 "points", and then an upside down arrow appears underneath the "up vote" arrow.

Thank you, I had the same idea about collapsing threads. This is really helpful!

Yeah, and normally I don't bother commenting, I just downvote and move on, but given that the comments section was already (in my mind) a disaster and the irony of the parent post I made an exception.

>That's funny. I find HN far more annoying because of conversations like this.

I appreciate the critiques, saves me the wasted time going to the twitter thread and then being annoyed in the same manner.

> good technical conversations [...] critiquing things like the font that someone's using on their site

Critiquing the font is a technical conversation to a front-end designer :)

As far as I can tell, HN isn't designed or intended for "good technical conversations", nor "on-topic conversations". It's intended for "interesting conversations in general" (or some variant) based on the guidelines, behavior of the moderator(s?), and content.

I don't necessarily like this kind of bent, but that's the way that it is. If you want consistent technical conversations, you should check out Lobste.rs.

I wonder if HN should offer two sections: Opinion and Insight. You decide where to post, but others can disagree through reports. If someone answers a question with an insightful comment, the thread is moved over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com