Hacker News Reader

It's useful as a survey of (perhaps somewhat old) opinions about a topic; it's pretty useful as a collection of pros/cons, and imo interesting for its historical context besides.

> an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself.

That's exactly why I find it valuable. Little to no pretense of looking good and a bunch of perspectives in little space. An occasionally useful starting point to get the lay of the land.

It's also almost perfectly what any long-running or stickied thread on any forum ever was, and that was usually a good thing.

> The TvTropes of the programming community

Not sure what you were expecting, but that was very much what some of us were looking for.

> an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself.

Kinda like HackerNews but from before someone invented modern threading and quoting, yeah?

A time waster's not always a bad thing; I spent lots of time browsing it back when I was a student intern because it seemed on topic" enough for me to not feel guilty.