Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing (2013)

as a reformed C programmer, I get a little kick out of the elevators in Europe starting on floor 0. Starting with index [0] is a little thing. Can we have little things? I'm not trying to antagonize anyone, it isn't a finger in anyone's eye, I'm not trying to make your day worse - it just a little thing that makes my life very slightly nicer for a very short period of time.

I’d add arguing by using inline quotes. Example:

some snippet of text from parent comment

I disagree because x, y, z.

another snippet

This is wrong because a, b, c.

(End example)

Doing so obliterates context from a position, especially long form comments (which is the main reason I’m here) in two main ways. First, the technique rarely reproduces the parent in its entirety, picking out black and white statements that are easier to argue against from a sea of nuance. Second, it cuts up the narrative in such a way that downplays the rationale of a position by either leaving out reasoning, or placing arguments between the reasoning and the conclusion.

Sure, the readers can go back and reread the parent. But when the structure of an argument depends on those snippets (and it almost always does) it becomes very difficult to grok.

Generally I just see it as a big warning sign that the quoter is more interested in winning than learning or getting to the truth of the matter and thus is best ignored.

My standards are probably different, but I don't feel like I see very much those those kind of comments. Our conversations are really pretty decent in contrast to much of the web.

The overattribution of notable effects and fallacies gets a bit tiring, though. As the article mentions, we love to bring up things like the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Peter Principle, the confirmation bias, etc. Sometimes I don't think people actually know what they're talking about when they say that someone has "confirmation bias"; it's just become a 115 IQ way of saying that the other person is stupid.

When it comes to comments, I see downvote abuse happen a little more frequently than I'd hope. I'm not just complaining about my own comments, but just about every day I see a comment that got downvoted for saying nothing objectively wrong or controversial. It's only a few people abusing the system, really, but it'd still be nice if I noticed such things less often.

Maybe it's my age and having come up via years of Usenet where inline quoting was absolutely standard, but I find inline quoting of a discussion helps me keep the flow of discussion. I find it's easier to follow than trying to retain a lengthy parent that a commenter is replying to, also at length.

If it's a long comment it's also likely some commenters are only able to address parts of it - again an inline quote clarifies.

I've never had cause to see it as a warning sign or more likely to be someone scoring points, that's going to happen sometimes with or without inline snippets.

No problem, its not a serious pet-peeve. I even find it a bit amusing.