I'm tired of seeing the errors that prompt most of those comments. The comments themselves are often very much legitimate.
Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
151–160 of 229 posts
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Shrug. Most of the "citation needed" posts I've seen are in response to comments like "almost all recipients of welfare spend it on smokes and alcohol." [citation needed] Personally, I don't feel that you need to back your assertion up with facts. If I wish to take issue with it, the onus is on me to go and scrape HN to produce the definitive validation or refutation of your claim. Which was Saurik's point, I think.
That doesn't make sense. Sure, when you leave a comment asserting something, you don't need to provide a full bibliography of references, but if someone asks for it (ie, someone follows up with [citation needed]) then the onus is on you to show that your facts have a basis in reality. I don't see anything wrong with that. You can't really disprove something which doesn't have any factual basis.
Surely if someone asks for a citation then they need to provide at a minimum some countering anecdotes. Otherwise their "[citation needed]" is even weaker than my anecdote-supported assertion... And if they're going to present countering evidence, why not just do so without the superfluous "[citation needed]"?
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#153On balance I disagree with most of Ken's observations, though not always or in all cases. A useful comment is one which moves the conversation forward. A non-useful comment is one which serves NO useful purpose. Correlation is not causation. This is useful where a naive correlation is shown without causal mechanism. It's not useful when a correlation is shown and there's a strong causal link known. http://www.explain…
"If you're not paying for it, you're the product."
I have to say that I disagree with this meme in general. Google does not sell me (yet, at least) to its advertisers. It sells screen real estate and placed links. Sure, the links are very targeted, and more specific than much (probably not all) advertising that preceded it.
I know that this meme is trying to make a general point, i.e. "there's a hidden cost to using this service", but I think it's overly-general and unnecessarily negative. Many people enjoy newspapers and TV that rely primarily on advertising for their revenue. I actually find Google's sponsored links on their search results to be very helpful on occasion, and at other times I find advertising a problem. Why the tendency to be so dismissive and over-simplify?
I also think that this meme is part of a general trend of finding pithy ways to sound smart without acknowledging that most issues, such as the way web services should be funded, are actually quite complicated.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#154My favorite is the 'most politicians or CEOs are sociopaths'
I think the psychology of sociopath is complicated enough without the need to assume one who made it to the top is a sociopath.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#155Part of the problem here is that any open [web] community will eventually contain more people who've joined after you than people who joined before you. Consequently, stuff you learned long ago is still new and interesting to the majority of the population.
I had a interesting discussion with @ColinWright a few months back about how you might design a forum based separate cohorts for each time period in which people joined, and on scoring each post separately within each cohort - if I had a few months to spare I would love to try building & launching that. Sadly, I don't.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#156One thing that really annoys me about HN is how damn contrarian everyone always tries to be. Responses typically take the most absolute narrow and unforgiving interpretation of any point you are trying to make and subsequently use that to spin a counterpoint. Drives me batty.
It's flattering to oneself to be contrarian; Not only have you already considered what has been presented, you've also thought about it and have a counter-argument. You're cleverer than the author of the article; she still entertains that idea while you have long ago dismissed it. Thought that's rarely the case. What usually happens is someone will read a clever article, get upset that they didn't come up with it and…
Maybe it is also a reaction to what is often remarked upon as the falling signal to noise ratio: if everyone may expect to be skewered, then fewer will be encouraged to post.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#157This would be the kind of comment the author hates...but isn't "If you're not paying for it, you're the product" a fallacy as well ? Paying for something is orthogonal to being a part of what's sold to to someone else. For instance newspapers/magazines cost a price but still "sell" their audience to advertisers. And yes, I love communities nitpicking news items, because it's not as if the internet is in lack of discu…
That statement is not a fallacy. Assuming a product is made by a business that hopes to become profitable, if the users aren't paying for it then what other business reason can there be to having users at all? Your example doesn't support the argument since it just states that if users pay for something it doesn't mean that they aren't also the product. So it is possible to pay for something and be part of the produc…
> but not possible to not pay for something and not be a part of the product.
I'll reuse a newspaper example fo simplicity. An ad company might pay to reach some portion of the audience (for instance the female worker segment between 18 and 30). But you don't control who will actually accesses the paper, and the 5 years old boy using it to craft paper boats is not in the target and just happens to use the product.
A company doesn't have to monetize 100% of their user base, and it might not want to for any reason. There is no binding forcing a user of something to be on some side of a product/not product fence. It can be neither, ot can be both.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#158The biggest problem with Hacker News comments -- actually, make that all comments -- is fundamental: the sort of people that leave comments are (more often than not) people that want something, ANYTHING, to say, not people that have something to say.
I think the karma system can also be a contributor to this. Any comment you make has the chance to get a few upvotes, regardless of how little it contributes to the conversation. So people just spam comments to get a few points here and there. This phenomena can be seen in forums without karma also but i think in places with karma it is usually worse, worst offenders being digg and reddit where everybody tries to mak…
>A better algotithm calculating the karma as an average over all your comments maybe could help
The metric I would most like to know is how many votes my comments got divided by the total number of words in my comments.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#159So we should eliminate any methodolgy which ensures accurate communication and the burden should be placed on anyone who wishes to challenge an assertion? At least it's evident this isn't an academic forum, however any forum can be thought of as a "debate team".
People ought to be held to some standard of rigor if they decide to make an assertion. For me, that standard starts with the original assertion, not with someone who decides to question it.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#160My personal favorite is "The plural of anecdote is not data". Correct. The plural of anecdote is conversation , which is exactly the reason we're here. I think this one comes down to people misunderstanding the reason we're here in the first place. If you start to notice that the discussion here resembles the sort of conversation you'd have around the watercooler, that's probably has to do with the fact that Hacker N…
I'll add calling things "Cargo Cult" to my list of pet peeves. The Cargo Cult example is getting Cargo Culted.