Comment by concinds
4 days ago
There's a lot of legitimate criticism, but they're also a noticeable amount of "reply guy"-ism (pedantry that can sometimes derail the conversation and bring nothing of substance) and "pet peeve syndrome" (people who'll always repeat the same criticisms of a product or company even if completely off-topic for a submission). It would probably be hard to classify them. And whenever I go on reddit I see that both are enormously worse on there.
are the "reply guy" and "pet peeve syndrome" considered bad? because i think they're a big part of the value i get in the HN comments.
my mental model of the comment section on any page is "let's get all the people interested in this article in the room and see what they talk about" rather than "here is a discussion about this article specific"
i also assume that <50% of the people in any comment section have actually read the original article and are just people hopping in to have a convo about something tangetially related to the headline.
The flourishing of pet peeve syndrome means that once you understand the hivemind, you can predict the comments just from the headline alone.
It is bad. Its fine when you read the opinions for the first time, but after a while you notice over half of the discussion is just repeating the same off-topic talking points over and over and over again on every submission.
"Off topic but...", "The CSS on this site...", "Have you noticed this web page is 5/10/20MB...", "Why is the webpage making 20+ requests...", "Microsoft bla bla bla...", "Elon Musk bla bla bla...", "I havent used cryptocurrency at all and it is bad because..."
All of these on some post about a new library release or government policy or social commentary.