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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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This seems like a bad rule. A lot of time gets wasted fixing trademark & branding collisions, fixing format incompatibilities, and fixing UX dark patterns that confuse users. People should be thinking about these issues, especially people building brands around their projects.

People are thinking about the issue, but HN has decided that it’s not the place to discuss it.

It’s like the anti politics rule. Politics is absolutely important but there are other forums to discuss it in.

HN isn't the comment section or feedback mechanism for 99% of the stories posted here; in fact, a large percentage of stories posted on HN are here without the knowledge of the author. So in addition to the fact that threads about presentation issues are attractive nuisances --- low-specificity issues that generate opinions from large numbers of HN commenters, often unlike (and competing with) the high-specificity topics of the stories themselves that we're actually here to discuss --- there's almost never any point to them. The original story authors aren't taking our feedback. We're just yelling at the clouds and making things worse for ourselves.

I missed that in the guidelines. Good to know.

It's a relatively recent addition... sometime in the last 3 years I think :)

Edit: June 2020. Pretty close guess!

Edit 2: ah, but the bit about name collisions wasn't added until Dec 2021.

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