> In this case, the provocative title isn't supported by the contents so it'll leave most readers disappointed.
One problem is with Hacker News itself: it makes no space for context other than an article title.
Whereas the gist was originally posted by the author in a tweet that said "Wrote a guide on how I keep homebrew in its place" and also had a screenshot of some of the article contents. And the people who would see it were those who followed the author (a lot of Mac admins).
HN submitters are not supposed to editorialize an article title. But, maybe HN should make room for an article summary that does editorialize!
Google search results for example have a little summary too, not just a link and a title. So you can make some kind of judgment about the content before clicking.
> it'll definitely rub people the wrong way to not to contribute but have a “Why Wasn't I Consulted!?!” post
How is this one such a post?
To be clear, though, there are some people who only use homebrew because some project requires it, and not because they want to use homebrew. So contributing to homebrew is the last thing they'd want to do, even though they use it sometimes, reluctantly.
It's fairly common for the cheapest thing to become the most popular thing, even if it turns out to be one of the worst things possible. Cheap and free too often crowd out better possibilities. With that in mind, I don't take "they provide it for free" to make something immune from criticism. My unpopular opinion is that there's actually too much open source in the world, and software developers are undermining themselves in the race to the bottom.
> Many of the comments here seem like meta-discussion to the submitter.
Well, I think it's unfair to take that out on the article author, who did not submit it to HN.
For whatever reason, HN does not allow downvoting of articles, only upvoting. I would take that up with dang. :-)
On the other hand, the article does contain useful instructions that are worthwhile for some people.