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It doesn't seem to be in the News Guidelines any longer, but the prevailing opinion on HN is that comments that simply say "I agree" or the like: 1) Add nothin
by teach 14y ago
It doesn't seem to be in the News Guidelines any longer, but the prevailing opinion on HN is that comments that simply say "I agree" or the like:
1) Add nothing to the conversation. Just upvote if you agree; also commenting to that effect adds nothing.
2) They clutter up the comments, so they are actually worse than not commenting at all.
I seem to recall a previous version of the style guidelines actively encouraging us to downvote such posts in order to train newer accounts to stop doing it. But I might not be remembering correctly.
In any case, I can pretty much guarantee that's why you were downvoted (and I didn't downvote you, personally).
- throwaway64 14y agoyou have to be careful with downvoting of new accounts, if they make a useless first comment and get heavily downvoted, the account will end up hellbanned, which is extremely frustrating for a new user.
- Zak 14y agoCreating an account to post a useless comment does not bode well for the quality of that account's future contributions.
- tjoff 14y agoWhich feels a bit dated now. Expressing that you agree isn't only valuable to the writer of the comment, and since the number of upvotes-downvotes isn't shown anymore the only way to express that you agree is to write an "I agree"-comment. Yes there are advantages and drawbacks of showing the upvotes-downvotes but one drawback is that you create a need for "I agree"-comments.