4 ms·

What exactly is the substance of this post you've just made? Just attacking the parent with no argument?

dang 4y ago
Perhaps I should have spelled out the argument more explicitly: taking this thread on the generic flamewar tangent of "lending is evil" is so off-topic and so inflammatory as to be trollish in effect if not in intent. It's exactly the thing the site guidelines ask commenters not to do here - note this from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." But you have a good point anyhow: moderation responses are tedious, repetitive, and mostly uninteresting, so in that sense there isn't a lot of substance in what I posted. However, at a meta level they're signals to the community (not just the commenter being replied to) about the kind of culture we want here, and in that way they're important. In case it helps at all, moderation comments are even more tedious to write than they are to read (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...). Unfortunately, I don't know how to preserve this forum for its intended purpose without posting a lot of them. They're neither on topic nor interesting; rather, they're an out-of-band feedback mechanism without which the system would rapidly degrade (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20out-of-band&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). That's the theory, at least. It's a pity that the system can't self-regulate. If we could get by with just community mechanisms (like upvotes and flagging) plus software, that would be awesome. Then I could just work on the code! Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way—there needs to be humans in the loop to jig the system out of its failure modes. So for better or worse you're stuck with this kind of thing.

dang 4y ago

Perhaps I should have spelled out the argument more explicitly: taking this thread on the generic flamewar tangent of "lending is evil" is so off-topic and so inflammatory as to be trollish in effect if not in intent. It's exactly the thing the site guidelines ask commenters not to do here - note this from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." But you have a good point anyhow: moderation responses are tedious, repetitive, and mostly uninteresting, so in that sense there isn't a lot of substance in what I posted. However, at a meta level they're signals to the community (not just the commenter being replied to) about the kind of culture we want here, and in that way they're important. In case it helps at all, moderation comments are even more tedious to write than they are to read (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...). Unfortunately, I don't know how to preserve this forum for its intended purpose without posting a lot of them. They're neither on topic nor interesting; rather, they're an out-of-band feedback mechanism without which the system would rapidly degrade (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20out-of-band&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). That's the theory, at least. It's a pity that the system can't self-regulate. If we could get by with just community mechanisms (like upvotes and flagging) plus software, that would be awesome. Then I could just work on the code! Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way—there needs to be humans in the loop to jig the system out of its failure modes. So for better or worse you're stuck with this kind of thing.