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I used to maintain a set of bookmarks where people just complained about the name of a thing on HN. It seems like a really consistent theme for people who don't
by codezero 7y ago
I used to maintain a set of bookmarks where people just complained about the name of a thing on HN. It seems like a really consistent theme for people who don't have much substance to contribute to threads. Any chance you could make it one of the disallowed/off-topic things?
I have never seen a developer respond to the comments with "Oh gee, you're right, I totally forgot about that, time to rethink the name!"
- joemi 7y agoI think there's nothing wrong with a moderator trying to stop too many threads being created with the same criticism (thanks dang!), but names of things can be very important from a branding/marketing perspective. If people can feel free to criticize other business/design decisions, I see no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to criticize names.
- codezero 7y agoPeople are free to do mostly as they please. It’s been my observation that comments about names have been consistently non-substantive, and virtually never provide any insight into the content of the post. Most complaints are simply “X has this name already” - the author almost certainly knows this and/or it never came up because it doesn’t affect them. I think complaining about aesthetics is pretty useless unless it’s constructive or about UX, but this isn’t my hill to die on :)
- dang 7y agoWe could try, but I doubt it would have much effect—humans are always going to react to names. Also, we're leery of making too long a list of disallowed things, since making it longer dilutes it. Better to argue from first principles. (We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508860. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508860.)
- codezero 7y agoMakes sense, thanks dang :)