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

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.