Comment by TheLoneWolfling
10 years ago
For one, I do not consider this OK.
For two, declaring rules and then declaring that no-one is allowed to talk about said rules sets a very dangerous precedent.
For three, pretty darn ironic that both this and http://deathtobullshit.com/ are on the front page at the same time.
Meta discussions, such as this thread, are ok from time to time. But they don't really make anyone smarter. HN exists for YC's purposes, if those don't align with mine, then I am free to vote with my metaphorical feet and literal clicks [or rather non-clicks]. Standards are what makes a community and there are many others with different standards and precedents.
My interpretation isn't that no one can talk about the rules, just that the comments on an article should be about the article content. You could still post your own Ask HN to discuss the rules.
A lot of off topic comments would be better served being made into full-blown blog posts (even if the author has no blog otherwise; one-off pages like Gists work fine for this) and then submitted. If HN wants to talk about the topic, the submitted page will get voted up like any other article, and discussion will ensue.
Generally, Ask HN topics shouldn't be meta discussions [nevermind meta complaints]. There's a feature request policy, and it's a potential conduit for bright solutions to policy problems that bypass debate.
We wouldn't bother bringing this up if it weren't a major and increasing problem in the threads, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179248) and have not changed.
I think it is a subject that should be brought up. I do not think that a flat-out "stop complaining about it" is the proper response - and, to be frank, it disappoints me that that is the approach you seem to have decided to take.
It very much reminds me of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand - namely, that the response of a link aggregator to more and more of the links it aggregates disappearing is to say "no it's not, there are <insert increasingly complex and increasingly quasi-legal workarounds here>, now stop complaining".
It's not just now that should be worrying, it's the continuation of the trend. And a website as major as this within its domain is one of the few that has more than a snowball's chance in Hell to divert said trend, assuming it acts in a timely fashion. But this is just waiting around like a lobster in a pot of water being slowly heated.
Oh we probably agree more than disagree about the trend, and it's certainly on-topic for HN in the sense that stories about it and debates about it are welcome here in their own context. Choking other threads like weeds is another matter. We've noticed that becoming more of a problem lately, hence this post.
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