Hacker News Guidelines

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.

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.