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Comment by nmilo | Hacker News Reader

I'm sick of this weird HN trend where readers pick out a single sentence only tangentially related to the rest of the article and then try to prove how smart they are by rebutting it.

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This is a good form habit. Discussion is largely about creating narratives and arguments to try to come to a consensus on reality. This is ostensibly useful.

When someone makes a statement and that statement is innaccurate or untrue, it is helpful to correct it so that they can change their post/future-posts to ensure they are making the strongest argument/most compelling narrative possible. Sometimes this is misused or misunderstood to be combative, but it is not constructive to approach conversation this way.

These Reddit-like comment sections with public vote counters highly incentivize this type of thing. I don't even know why HN has a voting system? I think sorting comment threads by number of replies would be more useful. Vote counters only make sense when you have a massive amount of comments to sort through, which really only happens on posts about Apple afaik. However, those comment threads tend to be filled with useless arguing anyways.

Would people stop using this site if it stopped offering dopamine hits in the form of a number next to your name?

Reply count can be more of an indicator of controversy, rather than value. The best comment might provide me deep me deep new insight, but all I have to say is "that's great!". Saying something inflammatory results in lots of replies.

In fact, the HN algorithm downranks threads with a high comment-to-point ratio.

I choose to believe there exists an old guard that use the site without points visible, either through frontend modification or mobile apps.

you mean that's not the whole point of posting here?

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