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The culture on Hacker News has historically been along the lines of, "if your comment is not more insightful than providing an upvote on the post, withhold it and leave an upvote instead." This was on the "welcome" page when signing up for a Hacker News account, and can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
See:
> The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial. ... The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything?
I think Hacker News comments tend to miss the mark on this test more often than not, to be fair. But it's perhaps worth at least politely pointing out when the substance test falls as far as, "this was essentially my approval of the more substantial parts of the post."
The irony of my comment is that I'm adding nothing to the discussion, myself. But hopefully there's some small value in reinforcing Hacker News' social ideals.
Arguably by now the percentage of genuinely new information or arguments on HN is pretty low and falling. Which in a place where discussion > new knowledge is only natural.
Pretty much like any place I can think of, HN is increasingly a virtual water-cooler social hangout where the participants cycle through.
Just reading the thread about encryption at the top of HN as I’m writing this comment was a bit depressing, because I didn’t find any remotely novel questions, answers or lines of reasoning before giving up on that thread. The intellectual and emotional downer for me wasn’t any better than reading the shallow/empty comment that you responded to.
So while I wholeheartedly concur with the sentiment you expressed, I’m also pretty much resigned to the fact, that I should expect less from HN and just move on to other parts of the net. Thank goodness, that RSS seems to be making a quiet comeback.
I keep seeing these posts on the "New" page, with only one comment, by the submitter, with some summary comment that doesn't add much, and I always assumed that it was a sketchy way to try to attract attention to the post. So I downvoted such comments when I saw them, because such games should be discouraged.
Now I feel like a real jerk. I've been downvoting innocent people who were led astray by the forum software.
I don't remember any specific names, but I owe a number of you an apology...