Hacker News Guidelines

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

This is one of the more serious pain points I notice (thankfully only occasionally).

Obviously getting some visibility is important for people launching new projects. Sometimes adversarial comments seem to be motivated by commercial rather than technical reasons.

A shallow article written in bad faith only deserves a shallow dismissal.

Don't force me to fight an asymmetric warfare battle against malicious authors to participate.

Does a ‘shallow article’ even merit a dismissive comment? Wouldn’t it be better simply to ignore it and find another thread on which to engage?

This makes sense to me since leaving a comment (even a negative one) would be a signal of engagement that would likely boost the likelihood of a given article being/remaining on the front page.