Because Hacker News wants people to stand behind their comments. Lack of accountability is not a desirable feature if you're trying to encourage civilized discussion.
And again, on a comment asking for someone to actually explain why they're doing this? This is really disappointing, Hacker News is usually a lot more well-behaved than this.
Because it was overly sarcastic. Hacker News, correctly, prefers commenters to make extended comments arguing a point rather than engaging in 'gotcha!' soundbite counterarguments.
This is both for improved civility (so that actual discussions can take place), and so that people flesh out their counterarguments more.
Because the person who posted it thought someone else on Hacker News might be interested.
That's pretty much the only reason one needs.
I was interested enough to read the article and you were interested enough,albeit in a negative sense, to add your comment; so it seems they were right.
Brudgers comment is at top because community thought it was worthy. Brudgers comment garnered 120 posts, meaning it sparked interest and posters contributed to that discussion. This is the underlying message of HN. Discussing.
What you say here is true. But it also lacks context - Hacker News is not intended to be a pure democracy. Combative discussion fostered by an incendiary comment shouldn't be acceptable just because it features factually accurate content upvoted en masse by the community.
If that were the case, Hacker News would not have guidelines or moderators. You could allow Hacker News to operate like a pure free-market economy, excusing this as long as it's democratically supported - but that is detrimental to the community's purpose in the long term. Online communities require involved government because the participants (demonstrably) cannot govern themselves when in a group. At worst, discussion devolves to chaos; at best, it becomes inefficient and bothersome. Like anything else, there are pros and cons to combative discussion, and the negatives outweigh the positives.
Examples like the Touch ID discussion and the Nest alarm discussion are particularly informative in this regard, because combative, rehashed meta-discussion took up an entire page in each instance.
I read the article and then realized why is it on the front page of Hackernews. Half the comments are flame-baiting. Wonder if there was a better way to self-moderate this without the moderators who may be offline on a Sunday.
I don't want to flag stories like this when they don't actually violate the terms of use. But IMHO, there should be some way for users to express the popular "Why is this on Hacker News?" sentiment without cluttering up the comment thread.
Otherwise, we'll just end up with upvoting cabals, and I'd argue that this story is likely to be a prime example of such.
I believe that is because many people don't want comment section in Hacker News turn into the one in Reddit, which consist of mostly jokes, pop culture references...things that doesn't really contribute to the discussion.
Why not? I'd much rather read and interact with the opinions of the fine people that make up this community on this topic than anywhere else on the interwebs.
It's frustrating to see comments being made about the quality of conversation by people who haven't read the article they're commenting on. The points mentioned refer to the program, not hacker news.
I wasn't looking for a whole "soul of Hacker News" thread here. I'd just like people to stop cluttering the comment threads with things that reinforce the behaviors of the "shitcocks" of the site.
The rest of my response I'll take offline to you directly. Why clutter the thread further?
People forget that Hacker News is explicitly not a forum for free speech or open discourse. It's a forum for curated speech, sometimes aggressively curated, preferring fewer comments of higher quality over more comments of lower quality, even at the cost of open discourse.
It gets on my nerves too but that's Chinatown, as it were.
It isn't that the comments are extremely bad. It is that the same attitude of essentially "not caring about the community" carries over into less controversial discussions. Which makes hacker news very noise for people who do want to have decent discussions, share information or whatnot.
Basically every story will have people who seem more interested of hearing themselves speak, snipe by down voting or one liners, don't make an effort or don't reply at all or can't leave the discussion to those who actually find it interesting. It is those attitudes or expressions that should be moderated, not topics.
Users may have flagged this comment because you made a very controversial claim without any support. On Hacker News, the bar for substantiveness is higher in this situation because the site exists for civil, intellectually interesting discussion, and predictable flamewars are precisely opposite.
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