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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

It's mortifying that this mixture of insult and irrelevance has so many upvotes. I know everyone's been worried about the amount of politics on the frontpage lately, but I'm much more worried about this comment. Political storms pass eventually, but comments like this rising to the top of HN threads is a sign of real decay.

Whatever you think of DHH, there is an important point in this article, and thanks to the people who upvoted this comment, the people talking about it are relegated to the bottom of the thread.

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Well, a lot of discussions in the last few months have top comment which a) was made early and b) disputes some minor technical point in the original article, while not being relevant to discussion.

Maybe making younger low scored/recently upvoted comments sink even slower could fix that?

In the meantime I use Chrome extension to fold those.

Yeah, I know. The underlying problem is the same. I've spent a good deal of time thinking about how to fix it. I wonder if it would work to normalize votes based on how far down the page a comment is. God would that complicate the code though.

You should name the feature the anti-bike shed.

Could we also have a communal "hide posts by this user" feature? Over time the aggregate data would be useful to detect who is like this - especially if we can select a reason for hiding a user.

Why don't you weight votes by age of the account? That would make the "old HN" more influential in the current one.

Interestingly enough, in this case that would have worked. If you only counted the votes of the oldest accounts, the comment in question would have had negative points.

One of my suggestions to solve the mean-dumb-upvoted comment problem:

if a comment is truly so mean or dumb that the moderators choose to kill it, allow them the option of applying a karma penalty to anyone who upvoted it (which should come with an automated warning message so people know why their karma suddenly dropped). It's, in a sense, a way of voting on votes.

People might still upvote such comments, but at least then they'll know they're taking a risk by violating HN standards.

The talk about the race is irrelevant, but I think the insult is relevant, if not nice. Perhaps you're still right that this comment shouldn't be at the top, but I have no problem with the sentiment it espouses being at the top. The story reeked of "humble brag" and "first world problems" and there are a lot of comments on this page saying as much. Clearly it was an impression that a lot of people agreed with.

You seem not to understand what the word "relevant" means. To be relevant, the insult should have attacked the point DHH was making. Charitably: you believe the insult was trenchant, and you've confused that for relevance.

The reality is that DHH's material success has little to do with whether setting overly ambitious goals sets people up for psychologically painful failures. If anything, it accentuates his point; you'd think that having DHH's resources would cushion the blow of not winning the 24 Hours Of Le Mans.

The insult doesn't have to attack the point he was making to be relevant to the discussion about the article. The insult was directed at the overall quality of the article and how it was written. That makes it relevant to the discussion about the article. The article came off as whiny with little redeeming qualities, and that is reasonable to discuss whether you agree with his point or not.

comment is likely at the top because user has high average karma, not due to upvotes, so in this case the problem is likely in software

Is it not possible that he would have ended at the bottom of the page not the top, and if so wouldn't it have been better for you to stay away to find out, since your comment likely adds many more downvotes to your parent comment?

Please, don't act like this is anything more than feigned humility poorly disguised as a tidbit of wisdom. Even calling it that is generous since he doesn't offer any real insight or solution.

The fact that you fail to understand why so many people agreed with that comment is equally mortifying. Is your blind sympathy for "rich guy problems" overpowering your ability to read between the lines?

So DHH is about to enter an extremely competitive race and he has good odds. I think it's fair to imagine that this has been the only thing on his mind for weeks. He then finishes second which is admirable by any standard and yet he is not happy. Frustrated with this, he analyses his own thinking and writes a blog post about it.

Do you really think that he thought "I'm going to brag, I just need an angle!"? Or, should he simply avoid writing because his situation is more privileged than most people?

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