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Genuine criticism would simply explain the design cliches you didn't like and move on. Calling something horrible is not effective criticism. You're a horribl
by foobarbazqux 13y ago
Genuine criticism would simply explain the design cliches you didn't like and move on. Calling something horrible is not effective criticism. You're a horrible person! How are you meant to grow out of that? Comparisons to GeoCities and PowerPoint without explaining yourself are not doing much either.
The point of criticism is that you give something actually useful to the person you are criticizing. Unless your goal is simply to put down the other party. It's a cliche to just dismiss something out of hand, the same way I dismissed your arguments without justifying myself. The reason I replied like that was to demonstrate how fill in the blanks things were. You cannot do that with real criticism. For example, this critique of your rhetorical cliches could not be applied to the website in question.
- scholia 13y agoI was being brief. The average HN user is easily smart enough to get the point. And at least it addressed the point at issue, which made it more of a contribution than your content-free response. By the way, you're also ignoring the original context. Anybody trying to offer helpful criticism surely wouldn't have done that, would they?
- foobarbazqux 13y agoSorry, I genuinely don't understand. How am I ignoring the original context (in my followup reply)? I'll agree that my response was content-free. It was even aggressively hostile, and I could have been kinder about it. I'm sure that it was not fun to have someone flagrantly mocking your words.
- scholia 13y agoMy original was a response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6039938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6039938 and the context was that the site was being criticized. > I'm sure that it was not fun to have someone flagrantly mocking your words. Seriously? You must have missed Usenet in the 1980s.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoOh I see. Yeah, I never really considered it. I like to think that we live in a more... enlightened age than when Usenet was around, and that was a genuine apology.
- scholia 13y agoNone needed, really. I didn't take offense at your comment, and I didn't think it was unfair. I'm not carrying any grudges ;-) (Belated response because I've just spent 24 hours travelling, and my brain is still something like a wet dishrag....)