Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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Let's not argue about what 'tangential' means or what Kant said (or McLuhan for that matter). If you can suggest a better word I'm all for it.

The point is that these generic-offtopic complaints are extremely repetitive. Maybe the first 1 or 2 (or 17) times one sees them they aren't a big deal, but after that it's bad to be overrun by them like weeds. It's not that they're wrong—rather, precisely because they have a point, they tend to get upvoted, crowding out more interesting/specific conversation. That then leads to complaints about the complaints and god help us. That's why we added that rule.

It's a tradeoff between the particular (yes the annoyance exists, yes the comment is valid—I personally agree with it) vs. the general (it's even worse to see these things over and over again, especially at the top of threads). Both are valuable, but only one can prevail and the global optimum is more important. If you really feel strongly about such formats, you should take it up with the people who are choosing to publish this way. Complaining to a link aggregator is like yelling at a photograph.

Thanks for the kind words, I think! - but... three links?

Also, I protest. The number of HN posts I "personally don't appreciate" is massively greater than the number I reply to. This is an internet forum, after all; I spend my days failing to appreciate things.

Probably half the people who frequent this website, if not more, are some form of web engineer or at the very least are web-adjacent. It’s a function of UX being a core paradigm of that work that leads to such frequent reflections about a submitted link’s “finer points.”

I understand the posts are extremely repetitive, but I’ve not seen a non-regressive attempt to account for this clear and evident desire to discuss this on HN’s part. As far as I know, HN has never tried to have a different comment section for this or other “””offtopic””” discussions, it’s only ever harangued people for talking about it.

I was a roofer in my twenties, three decades ago. When you ride around with roofers, you inevitably hear “oh, that one’s a piece of shit. Oh that one’s nice. Oh, they screwed the pooch with that flashing. Oh, that pattern looks great.” It’s part of the trade to reflect on other roofs, and it comes with the territory in most trades, ime, to talk to other tradespeople about best practices.

I’ve long thought splitting the comment section into Topic and Offtopic would result in better user experience, as well as tagging posts, being able to mute other users, and a million other features forums had twenty (!) years ago. I already know how desperately HN insists upon itself, but this is my frustration with the moderation surrounding these points. Users have no customization of the experience, they want to talk about the experience, HN says no, of course not.

Trade talk about craft is indeed great but HN has tons of that on lots of things. Thousands of identical complaints on a perennial annoyance is not interesting material to read. It may be satisfying to vent or to upvote, but let's not confuse indignation with intellectual interest. That's a fundamental distinction if you want to understand HN.

There are plenty of such repetitive/indignant symptoms and one of our jobs is to dampen them so they don't crowd out the things that actually are interesting to read. If we didn't do this, HN would consist of almost nothing but sensationalism, indignation, and the few hottest topics of the moment (ChatGPT these days). It's our job not to let that happen.

Having a separate comment section for this kind of thing would be a moderation nightmare and I don't think it would add to the quality of the site—quite the opposite. I once had a conversation with a founder of a (much) larger forum than HN, who told me that creating such a section (or something recognizably like it) was the biggest mistake they ever made.

I hear you about the frustration though. It's true that HN lacks a lot of features. There are many different ways to structure an internet forum/community—many more than have ever been tried, and I feel sure that there's still plenty of room for new ones to flourish. People feel understandably frustrated when this forum doesn't match the one that they imagine and believe (perhaps correctly!) would be much more satisfying.

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