One comment stands out to me:
> Whether to add it to the formal guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is a different question, of course. I'm reluctant to do that, partly because it arguably follows from what's there, partly because this is still a pretty fuzzy area that is rapidly evolving, and partly because the community is already handling this issue pretty well.
I guess me raising this question is because it feels maybe slightly off that people can't really know about this unwritten rule until they break it or see someone else break it and people tell them why. It is true that the community seems to handle it with downvotes, but it might not be clear enough why something gets downvoted, people can't see the intent. And it also seems like an inefficient way of communicating community norms, by telling users about them once they've broken them.
Being upfront with what rules and norms to follow, like the guidelines already do for most things, feels more honest and welcoming for others to join in on discussions.
* First, the guidelines get too large, and then nobody reads them all, which makes the guideline document less useful. Better to keep the guidelines page reduced down to a core of things, especially if those things can be extrapolated to most of the rest of the rules you care about (or most of them plus a bunch of stuff that doesn't come up often enough to need space on that page).
* Second, whatever you write in the guidelines, people will incline to lawyer and bicker about. Writing a guideline implies, at least for some people, that every word is carefully considered and that there's something final about the specific word choices in the guidelines. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" for a lot of nerds like us.
Perhaps "generated comments" is trending towards a point where it earns a spot in the official guidelines. It sure comes up a lot. The flip side though is that we leave a lot of "enforcement" of the guidelines up to the community, and we have a pretty big problem with commenters randomly accusing people of LLM-authoring things, even when they're clearly (because spelling errors and whatnot) human-authored.
Anyways: like I said, this is pretty well-settled process on HN. I used to spend a lot of time pushing Dan to add things to the guidelines; ultimately, I think the approach they've landed on is better than the one you (and, once, I) favored.
God I hate this. And it cuts across society, not just on HN or among nerds. Something like 10% or so of the people I interact with seem to just rules-lawyer their way through life as a default. "Well... as you can see in the rule book, section 5, paragraph 3, the rule clearly says we shouldn't do X, but it doesn't say we mustn't do X, so I'm clearly allowed to do X." Insufferable.
*Not applicable to Nations or States, or any place where people aren't free to come and go as they please.
dang: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
tomhow: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Where does that saying come from? I keep seeing it in a lot of different contexts but it somehow feels off to me in a way I can't really explain.
If it helps, you can think of it as saying more about possible disagreeing opinions than about the specific opinion expressed. "This answer is right, and the people who disagree are 'objectively' wrong."
It took me some time to catch on to this. It can certainly be jarring or obnoxious, though sometimes it can be helpful to say "yo people, you're treating this like a subjective opinion, but there are objective reasons to conclude X."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209137
Edit: Rereading the comments, I agree (heheh) with you analysis. I hadn't considered saying "I agree", because I didn't feel I was expressing an opinion, but a fact, like 1+1=2. The comment stated that the mods in fact disallow those comments and provided proof, so I didn't consider it an opinion.
I really like this conversation by the way. I'm actively trying to become a better writer (by doing copywork of my favourite writers), and no other forum on Earth has this sort of conversation in such an interesting, nuanced way.
Ultimately, I put it because:
- It was the most directly informative comment on the thread;
- It had been downvoted (greyed out) to the very bottom of the thread; and
- I wanted to express my support before making a fairly orthogonal comment without whiplashing everyone.
The whiplashing concern is the problem I run into most generally. It can be hard to reply to someone with a somewhat related idea without making it seem like you're contradicting them, particularly if they're being dogpiled on with downvotes or comments. I'd love to hear other ways to go about this, I'm always trying to improve my communication.
Just that this forum uses a common law styled system - and even added "think of X as..." making clear this refer to this analogy, not to official state law.
> no hijacking other people's Show HN threads to promote your own thing
This seems to happen a lot, so apparently not a very well enforced rule.