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Isn’t that kind of what you are doing by posting that comment? You could respond and explain why you disagree - instead you just shallowly dismissed their comme

by jjcon 6y ago

Isn’t that kind of what you are doing by posting that comment? You could respond and explain why you disagree - instead you just shallowly dismissed their comment by saying it was shallow. Also maybe I’m crazy but their comment seemed to be a joke/commentary on the environmental resources used by Bitcoin. That isn’t a shallow dismissal.

dang 6y ago
Moderation comments are certainly bad HN comments—they're off-topic, they're meta, they're repetitive as hell [1]. And you're right that they sometimes break the rules they're trying to enforce. They're also even more tedious to write than to read [2]. But, alas, they're necessary. You need an out-of-band feedback mechanism to nudge the system out of its failure modes. I take your point about the GP being a joke, though—the edit makes that clear. The problem with one-liners that don't disambiguate intent [3] is that they pattern-match to the most common category they look like. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
TheDong 6y ago
It's a shallow joke. One of the rules of HN is to attempt to have thoughtful and substantive discussions. An entire comment that is just a joke is not how you end up with substantive discussion, which I think has been well proven by reddit long since. It's fine to have a joke to lead into a well articulated point, but an entire comment shouldn't _just_ be a joke, unless it's the rare case of a joke that is insightful, not just a shared cultural reference (in this case to a common other argument on HN). > Isn’t that kind of what you are doing by posting that comment? I think this is akin to the paradox of tolerance. There's the saying "that with is presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence". I think the HN analogue would be "that which is posted without an attempt to have a substantive discussion can be dismissed out of hand". Similar to how a gish gallop works, it's absolutely not plausible for dang to respond to every comment that violates HN guidelines with a full breakdown of why he believes so. The volume of poor comments simply is so high that he would need to spend far more hours than he can spare for that.
- jjcon 6y ago
  It really wasn’t ‘just a joke’ though. There is a whole range of discussion to be had on the resources used by crypto - and if you can make a quip and also commentary I see that as valuable. Is it the pinnacle of HN comments? Not at all. But does it deserve to be moderated? Not in my book because it does bring up a valuable point of discussion.
alisonkisk 6y ago
Dozens of redundant meme comments aclrss the btc threads aren't helpful.

by jjcon 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Moderation comments are certainly bad HN comments—they're off-topic, they're meta, they're repetitive as hell [1]. And you're right that they sometimes break the rules they're trying to enforce. They're also even more tedious to write than to read [2]. But, alas, they're necessary. You need an out-of-band feedback mechanism to nudge the system out of its failure modes. I take your point about the GP being a joke, though—the edit makes that clear. The problem with one-liners that don't disambiguate intent [3] is that they pattern-match to the most common category they look like. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

TheDong 6y ago

It's a shallow joke. One of the rules of HN is to attempt to have thoughtful and substantive discussions. An entire comment that is just a joke is not how you end up with substantive discussion, which I think has been well proven by reddit long since. It's fine to have a joke to lead into a well articulated point, but an entire comment shouldn't _just_ be a joke, unless it's the rare case of a joke that is insightful, not just a shared cultural reference (in this case to a common other argument on HN). > Isn’t that kind of what you are doing by posting that comment? I think this is akin to the paradox of tolerance. There's the saying "that with is presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence". I think the HN analogue would be "that which is posted without an attempt to have a substantive discussion can be dismissed out of hand". Similar to how a gish gallop works, it's absolutely not plausible for dang to respond to every comment that violates HN guidelines with a full breakdown of why he believes so. The volume of poor comments simply is so high that he would need to spend far more hours than he can spare for that.

jjcon 6y ago
It really wasn’t ‘just a joke’ though. There is a whole range of discussion to be had on the resources used by crypto - and if you can make a quip and also commentary I see that as valuable. Is it the pinnacle of HN comments? Not at all. But does it deserve to be moderated? Not in my book because it does bring up a valuable point of discussion.

alisonkisk 6y ago

Dozens of redundant meme comments aclrss the btc threads aren't helpful.