3 ms·
which guideline says that a comment should be substantive? Could you please point it out?
by deepVoid 7y ago
which guideline says that a comment should be substantive? Could you please point it out?
- dang 7y agoI'm surprised we don't get that question more often. The answer is that if you follow the site guidelines, your comments will automatically get more substantive. For example, if one takes the name-calling ("Musk fanboys") and weak-interpreting (of cars on the road) out of your comment upthread, there would be nothing left of it. If there's a more specific guideline we could add that would cover any patches of unsubstantiveness that we currently miss, I'd love to know about it. The HN guidelines aren't a blacklist in which anything not listed counts as fair game. It would be foolish to try to make such a list, plus how tedious—and it would only invite trolls to drive trucks through loopholes. Instead, you need to read them more as a sketch of a certain intention, and then take that intention to heart. Doing that is what makes a good HN commenter, not conforming to a contract adversarially. HN is a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law kind of place. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756 from 5 years ago.