4 ms·
Why is this the top comment, this has nothing to do with what the article is about?
by websap 5y ago
Why is this the top comment, this has nothing to do with what the article is about?
- stefan_ 5y agoThe article is blogspam, so might as well complain about Medium.
- nvr219 5y agoBecause it’s important to remind people that medium is not good.
- JPKab 5y agoI wish I could find a way to agree with you that doesn't involve profanity. But here it is: Fuck medium. I absolutely despise it. Every time I Google for data science techniques I'm inundated with god-awful medium articles and sometimes good medium articles but the paywall is just so stupid. Typically I end up finding the exact same post from the exact same author duplicated on another site. It represents to me a huge degradation of the spirit of the world wide web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee. And yes there are many other sites that also represent this degradation such as Facebook and yes I hate them as well.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoJust block their JS. The content survives.
- davnn 5y agoDoes anyone have an idea why Medium articles are ranked so well on Google?
- comboy 5y agoWhy is a good question. But its usually complex enough to discourage chasing answer which is anywhere near the truth. The ultimate answer is the Universe, simplified version takes into account only brains of people who upvoted which is also unapproachable. So we settle for stories. Ones that are believable. Say this comment allows us to participate in the discussion without reading the article, because it has nothing to do with it. You of course open comments first, and there it is, comment about Medium (hey I know something about Medium!), which doesn't touch article - great because I have no idea what's in it. But most whys have uninterestingly many answers. We would love to just get the "main" reason. But how do you differentiate them? Say I commented because I felt like typing but also because I have Internet access. How do you assign weights to those? Another story reason - it's tech. We do tech. You can't escape the fact that once you have sophisticated patterns associated with something you perceive them. Ornithologist walk through the park is not the same as mine. And psychologist's social interactions are.. different. Also, why why? How many top comments are directly related to the article and not general topic in vicinity of it? Is it enough of an outlier to be interesting or is your model wrong? Why did I type all this.
- dang 5y agoIndignation and fault-finding routinely get upvoted. It seems rooted in human nature (or at least factors beyond our control), so the only thing that seems to work is for moderation to act as a countervailing mechanism, e.g. by downweighting such subthreads. I've done that to the GP now. It's also why we added this site guideline: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html