Comment by mlsu

HN Comments are kinda like Twitter. They have all of the same attributes:

- every now and then there is a fantastic tweet

- many of them are bad

- there's a lot of them, more than you could ever read

- they are all consistent: you're used to the format, the rules are simple to understand

- there are some ads and some ulterior motives, but for the most part, it's just normal people posting

Of course they aren't special! This article is kind of a "category error." No dig at the author with this, seriously. I genuinely think it's a good post, worth sharing (that's why I'm commenting here!). BUT, this article is kind of like:

Why I don't expect my dog to cook me breakfast any more

Breakfast is great. It fills you up, it tastes good, and after you've been sleeping a while you get pretty hungry, a problem that breakfast solves handily. Occasionally, I have had breakfast cooked for me; it is wonderful!

But I have noticed that my dog never cooks me breakfast. This is because it's a dog. It could be because it doesn't share the same love for breakfast that I have. It could be that it does not have opposable thumbs, or perhaps the lack of prefrontal cortex development. Either way, I've noticed that my dog has never ever cooked me breakfast.

For this reason, I've stopped expecting my dog to cook me breakfast. It seems like every time I expect this to happen, it doesn't happen.

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What I have noticed about HN comments is that HN commenters are usually very intelligent people, and they usually comment "for fun." This is in contrast to nearly everywhere else on the internet, where people are either not very bright (so their comments aren't very clever or even fun to read) AND/OR posting comments or articles with the motive to make money. By volume, I'd say most stuff on the internet does not exist "for fun" but rather because it is self-promotional for some reason.