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I apologize, I didn’t intend to pull the thread off topic. Clearly I was interpreting the article differently than most people were. I had only responded so str

• dang 9y ago
  Thanks for such a neutral reply. I appreciate it, especially since my comment was on the harsh side. The article struck other people that way too, and I can see why. But this is precisely where HN commenters need to exercise a little self-discipline. If a comment is picking up on the obvious, hottest, most generic point that someone could make about the article, that's a different game than HN is supposed to be for. That's the hot public argument game. We're trying for something quite different here—call it the obscure curiosity game. We're looking for non-obvious insights, something unpredictable. The other game is more or less always the same, and is driven by very different emotions than curiosity. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that it doesn't belong here. It's off topic and it destroys what's on topic. This is most important when an article has enough material to support either kind of discussion, which I'd say was definitely the case here. I'd love to get better at explaining this, because I feel like if we could put it into just the right words, most HN users would see that it's in their interests to play the intended game and resist playing the unintended one.