I think in a lot of cases there is a lot of value. You make an interesting analogy to the PC revolution, but Apple is now making huge sums of money by limiting

I think in a lot of cases there is a lot of value. You make an interesting analogy to the PC revolution, but Apple is now making huge sums of money by limiting user customizability and essentially telling people what they want. If you take extreme customizability to it's logical end then everybody just ends up writing their own web-app front ends on top of public apis. I don't know that that's better. There are certain best practices that probably should be enforced. I guess you might argue that a sensible default would satisfy that need, while allowing for deviations for those who care. The last thing I'll say then is that perhaps a community wants to enforce (or at least encourage) some cultural features. If people can customize out certain cultural features then you lose that ability. For instance, maybe HN wants itself to be a place where comments are ranked in a certain way so that new comments aren't completely buried and everybody is at least forced to scan over them. If you can customize that out, it possibly hurts the culture. This is kind of rambly and the thread is already old but it could be a very interesting discussion. feel free to contact me directly (gmail: andrewmbenton).