Hacker News Reader

Comment by phyrex | Hacker News Reader

I’m sorry to single you out but I’m seeing more and more knee-jerk responses like this, similar to what’s common on Reddit, and I don’t like it. I come to HN for thoughtful discussion, and this adds nothing to the discussion but only sets a combative tone that’s making further considerate discussion even harder

View on HN

These comments irk me as well. Most of them could add substantive material to the discussion simply by tacking on a few sentences -- you can still start the comment with "Water is wet", but then explain specifically which elements of the story you feel are history repeating itself. And maybe link us to a few of those historical parallels so we can get a sense of how these things tend to evolve over time, or discuss the nuances of the similarities/differences.

Anyways, thank you for calling out low-value discussion. It would be amazing if we could raise the bar a bit.

That ship has sailed my friend. Comments like this have been proliferating for some time. And then they take off on their own uninteresting threads like you see on Reddit, with people just repeating low-effort meme responses on and on and on.

It even has its own useless follow-up comment: "Frozen water?"

Yeah the old refrain that the Redditification of HN is an illusion[0] becomes less true with each passing year. Communities obviously change with time, but the Covid era and the tumult with Reddit really did a number on this one.

As a postscript, the comments linked in the "illusion" claim of the guidelines are very interesting. Several of them are pointing out distinctly un-HN like behavior, though others point out things that have already become normalized on HN. The frog is boiled slowly.

[0] "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills." -- last guideline at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We are duty bound to downvote low effort shit-posts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com