I tend to agree. About 90% of the critical comments on startups are things that occur to people within literally the first few minutes of thinking about them.

I tend to agree. About 90% of the critical comments on startups are things that occur to people within literally the first few minutes of thinking about them. If that long. Those comments are at best valueless, and perhaps even of negative value, both to the startup and to the wider community. Probably even to the commenters themselves. The people involved in the company, the founders, the employees, the investors, they all have brains of their own and those same problems occurred to them in about the same amount of time. There's no real insight there, no true value added. Nearly all of your initial reactions as an outsider is a known-known, so where's the value? What is useful, at least to the commenter, and likely the community, and maybe even the company itself is taking the next step- What would make what you think is an issue not a problem? How can it be solved? How can it be avoided altogether? That's where the actual insight comes in, not in spotting the problems that are obvious to everyone in 60 seconds. This morning I went through the list of YC Demo Day companies from yesterday and made notes about my initial reactions to each. What I thought was cool, what I thought was likely to be a problem, what I didn't get at all. Probably pretty much the same reactions everyone else had. And over the next whatever period of time, I'm going to think about why they could work, or what it would take to make them work, or what their "real plan" is. Just as a way to keep my brain active beyond kneejerk responses. For me, that's infinitely more useful than whatever immediate dismissal comes to mind.