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I usually don't comment on these sorts of comments, but since you're a very active user I'l bite. I downvoted you because this type of commentary is the least

by avar 9y ago

I usually don't comment on these sorts of comments, but since you're a very active user I'l bite. I downvoted you because this type of commentary is the least useful thing you can read on HN. Nobody learned anything useful from knowing that some guy with a GMail account isn't pleased with the spam filter. What was this supposed to achieve? Some long side-thread with people sharing anecdotes about whether or not GMail worked for them? This is the sort of thing that gets made fun of at n-gate.com. Also: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ColinWright 9y ago
Thank you for the response! That gives me something useful to be going on with. In contrast to your comment, I've always found the personal experiences of HN users to be incredibly valuable data points, which is why I shared my own. I'll re-evaluate that. WRT the guidelines, I'm painfully aware of that one. While I appreciate its wisdom, it means that one can never learn from the otherwise anonymous downvotes, so to my mind it's worth taking the risk. In this case I really have learned something. Again, thank you.
- nitrogen 9y ago
  As a personal anecdote, I've also noticed that people around me are less interested in personal anecdotes in general. It seems more pronounced over time. I could hypothesize that Facebook and Twitter give people all the anecdotes they need, or that my anecdotes have become more poorly worded over time, but I really have no idea what the cause is.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
> Nobody learned anything useful from knowing that some guy with a GMail account isn't pleased with the spam filter. I didn't, because I'm already aware through personal experience that gmail's spam filter is much too strict, consigning legitimate emails to the spam folder despite the fact that any idiot could tell you they were real. But in general, I don't see why one user's comment that the spam filter is terrible should be viewed as less "useful" than another user's comment that the spam filter is great.
- avar 9y ago
  That's not the difference between the two comments. The positive comment claimed that GMail's filtering was good because they can do it at scale with ML. Yours and the comment I was responding to just assert that it's still bad. Maybe it is, but no amount of people showing up in the thread asserting that it sucks will make for interesting reading. What would make them interesting is an educated guess about why it's bad.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    Making an interesting-and-wrong comment is not obviously better than making an uninteresting-and-correct comment unless you're here purely to be entertained. To me, the uninteresting-and-correct comment is much more valuable.

by avar 9y ago

ColinWright 9y ago

Thank you for the response! That gives me something useful to be going on with. In contrast to your comment, I've always found the personal experiences of HN users to be incredibly valuable data points, which is why I shared my own. I'll re-evaluate that. WRT the guidelines, I'm painfully aware of that one. While I appreciate its wisdom, it means that one can never learn from the otherwise anonymous downvotes, so to my mind it's worth taking the risk. In this case I really have learned something. Again, thank you.

nitrogen 9y ago
As a personal anecdote, I've also noticed that people around me are less interested in personal anecdotes in general. It seems more pronounced over time. I could hypothesize that Facebook and Twitter give people all the anecdotes they need, or that my anecdotes have become more poorly worded over time, but I really have no idea what the cause is.

thaumasiotes 9y ago

> Nobody learned anything useful from knowing that some guy with a GMail account isn't pleased with the spam filter. I didn't, because I'm already aware through personal experience that gmail's spam filter is much too strict, consigning legitimate emails to the spam folder despite the fact that any idiot could tell you they were real. But in general, I don't see why one user's comment that the spam filter is terrible should be viewed as less "useful" than another user's comment that the spam filter is great.

avar 9y ago
That's not the difference between the two comments. The positive comment claimed that GMail's filtering was good because they can do it at scale with ML. Yours and the comment I was responding to just assert that it's still bad. Maybe it is, but no amount of people showing up in the thread asserting that it sucks will make for interesting reading. What would make them interesting is an educated guess about why it's bad.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  Making an interesting-and-wrong comment is not obviously better than making an uninteresting-and-correct comment unless you're here purely to be entertained. To me, the uninteresting-and-correct comment is much more valuable.