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Hacker News Guidelines

(news.ycombinator.com)
446 points tonmoy | 2 comments | 24 Aug 23 16:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.591s | source
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naillo ◴[24 Aug 23 17:24 UTC] No.37251836[source]▶
The only one I subtly disagree with is "comments should be substantive". What it discourages I think is comments like "thanks" or other really 'unsubstantive' comments. It's true that maybe it adds noise, and in many cases are maybe supposed to be inferred without explicitly saying. But I think discouraging this slightly leans behaviour towards snark vs not. (If you see comments like "thanks" you're less likely to be snarky than if you see 'substantive' but maybe too harsh critiques in the comments that appear because "cool project!" isn't allowed.)

Personally I like to make it a point to break this rule from time to time to reduce this pattern.

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freedomben ◴[24 Aug 23 18:01 UTC] No.37252405[source]▶
I agree, though I think for posts deserving a "thanks" it's not too hard to make it substantive. For example, if I wanted to thank you for this comment, I might say something like this:

Thanks, that's very helpful. You make a good point about comments like "cool project!" not being allowed, which could cause the overall sentiment to feel skewed negative when it might actually be well received. That said, it can feel noisy and unhelpful to see a thread full of empty comments, so what if we had a thumbs up button or something that people could use to register "cool project" ? Maybe not practical, but just thinking through the problem a bit.

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1. krapp ◴[24 Aug 23 18:13 UTC] No.37252556[source]▶
I think the idea is that if you can't make a substantive comment, you refrain from commenting at all.

It's a weird dynamic to have in a web forum, where people are essentially engaging in text-based conversations, but casual, emotive speech is discouraged because that's what Redditors do, and every keystroke brings us closer to Eternal September.

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2. toofy ◴[25 Aug 23 03:07 UTC] No.37257524[source]▶
> I think the idea is that if you can't make a substantive comment, you refrain from commenting at all.

me too. how many of our grandmothers repeatedly said, “if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

it’s wild to me to see how much The Internet has tried to pretend it can escape from things humans figured out were important a century ago. in a lot of ways we’ve collectively fooled ourselves into believing the people who came before us were all stupid.

i mean, so many of the failures we’re seeing from companies or large communities have turned out to be our own hubris pretending as if The Internet wouldn’t have super basic, reaaaaally basic human problems like, “if you’re not nice, 1) people will be rude back and 2) a community full of assholes will _shockingly_ be a shitty place.”

this is basic shit that even a social halfwit knows when they go out in public, but we (myself included) are hilariously relearning and pretending like it’s a deep revelation.

if we can’t post anything nice, don’t post anything at all. we act liek this is complicated.