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.

SushiHippie already said it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37252326), but pg made this point way back in https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html (2009):

Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.

Whole subs on Reddit are essentially rendered worthless because the comments are all low-effort, meme responses. This is one of the only places I've been online where the discussion of Prigozhin's death wasn't just 500+ "Fell out of a window" comments.

THANK YOU

100%. Whenever I read somebody's response on an article, the first thing that lights up for me cognitively - "is this a reddit-level comment?".

How many times have you seen a deeply nested Reddit thread where each reply is maybe a single sentence long, and they're all low hanging word puns? Just completely worthless threads that are all noise.