Comment by dang

The trouble with comments like this is that they make discussions shallower and more generic, which makes for worse threads [1]. Actually it's not so much the comment as the upvotes, but shallow-generic-indignant comments routinely attract upvotes, so alas it amounts to the same thing.

The most recent guideline we added says: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting." I suppose that complaints about writing style fall under the same umbrella.

Not that these things don't matter (when helping people with their pieces for HN I always tell them to define jargon at point of introduction), but they matter much less than the overall specific topic and much less than the attention they end up getting. So they're basically like weeds that grow and choke out the flowers.

(This is not a personal criticism—of course you didn't mean to have this effect.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...