I worked in a big box electronics retail store in the early 2010s. Most customers were reasonably trusting which as someone not looking to screw them over made for quite a pleasant job. Perhaps the worst type of customer, was the vaguely ‘informed’ know it all ‘nerd’. Around this time, the “don’t buy the expensive gold-plated HDMI cable” movement was in full swing, but it was also about this time that different types of HDMI cables were starting to matter for (higher-end) prosumer setups.

Trying to convince some abrasive knowitall that our $15 home brand HDMI cable is going to be the bottleneck in their setup, and that it was basically orthogonal to any ‘good plated’ BS, was almost always not worth it. Eventually I learned to just let them make their own mistakes, dooming them to slink off to Amazon or whatever when they weren’t getting the resolution or frame rate they were after and eventually happened upon the CNET article that made them see the light.

The fact that there is an objective functional difference between different types of HDMI cables, whereas the jury is still out on blue blocker glasses, is pretty much irrelevant to my point. Any ‘science says…’ rhetoric is almost always parroted by people that don’t know what they’re talking about. At the end of the day, self-described ‘informed consumers’ LOVE feeling like they’ve got The Knowledge that’s going to give them a leg up on the slimy salesperson. A fair bit of the time though, the fact that the majority of these people aren’t actually all that knowledgeable means that these pearls of wisdom get corrupted over time and end up being entirely untrue. I’ve got no doubt that plenty of Hacker News regulars are the sorts of people that were incredibly hard to work with back then.