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Comment by ctide | Hacker News Reader

Nothing like a bunch of comments tearing apart a website built by people who, presumably, learned to code a few months ago and threw it together over the course of a few weeks. Yeah, it has a few issues, but it's significantly better than the first things I ever built and sent off to the world.

Keep it classy, HN.

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Examples of "tearing apart"? At its worst, the feedback is terse. If all one wants are warm and fuzzies, one wouldn't submit here.

Constructive feedback rather than warm fuzzies are suggested.

What's the point in submitting this to HN if not to get feedback?

to get mindful feedback.

It's fundamentally horrible. The whole design approach is horrible. It's the contemporary equivalent of GeoCities, just using more recent but equally mindless design cliches.

In fact, it's so horrible it makes PowerPoint look good.

(For parties that wanted to downvote this comment more than once: you can do so by clicking "link", then clicking "flag".)

From your profile: "Cofounder of a dev training program called Hack Reactor"

Hacker Reactor is where this website originated from and you're behaving this way? You've been a HNer for over 2,000 days. You should know better.

Your criticism is fundamentally horrible. The whole rhetorical approach is horrible. It's the contemporary equivalent of a flame on USENET, just using more recent but equally mindless rhetorical cliches.

In fact, it's so horrible it makes YouTube comments look good.

Rhetoric goes back centuries so it's unlikely I've come up with anything new. Otherwise, it contains genuine criticism that is rarely found in YouTube comments. The site is a patchwork of trendy design cliches that make the information less accessible than it would be in, for example, PowerPoint. And what we know about the mindless use of design cliches (see GeoCities) is that they date badly.

In sum, I think my complaint has more to it than your parodic reply.

There is in fact a more sensible response above: "We are aware of a lot of the issues on the home page and plan to completely redesign it soon."

Genuine criticism would simply explain the design cliches you didn't like and move on. Calling something horrible is not effective criticism. You're a horrible person! How are you meant to grow out of that? Comparisons to GeoCities and PowerPoint without explaining yourself are not doing much either.

The point of criticism is that you give something actually useful to the person you are criticizing. Unless your goal is simply to put down the other party. It's a cliche to just dismiss something out of hand, the same way I dismissed your arguments without justifying myself. The reason I replied like that was to demonstrate how fill in the blanks things were. You cannot do that with real criticism. For example, this critique of your rhetorical cliches could not be applied to the website in question.

I was being brief. The average HN user is easily smart enough to get the point. And at least it addressed the point at issue, which made it more of a contribution than your content-free response.

By the way, you're also ignoring the original context. Anybody trying to offer helpful criticism surely wouldn't have done that, would they?

Sorry, I genuinely don't understand. How am I ignoring the original context (in my followup reply)?

I'll agree that my response was content-free. It was even aggressively hostile, and I could have been kinder about it. I'm sure that it was not fun to have someone flagrantly mocking your words.

My original was a response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6039938 and the context was that the site was being criticized.

> I'm sure that it was not fun to have someone flagrantly mocking your words.

Seriously? You must have missed Usenet in the 1980s.

Oh I see. Yeah, I never really considered it. I like to think that we live in a more... enlightened age than when Usenet was around, and that was a genuine apology.

None needed, really. I didn't take offense at your comment, and I didn't think it was unfair. I'm not carrying any grudges ;-)

(Belated response because I've just spent 24 hours travelling, and my brain is still something like a wet dishrag....)

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