Things will not change

Not quietly, but perhaps just not loudly to everyone around you... an email to the author is a billion times better than another worthless HN comment about color contrast.

to me this sounds like complaining about evolution (in the biological terms). things are evolving, some experiments are failing, better ways of doing things are emerging. is it stressful? sure. can one at sometimes feel overwhelmed? absolutely.

it's always a balance between getting things done and evolving the way you craft your things.

all things that are successful are build on other things. it's extremely rare to start from scratch.

wrt marginal design choices like colour schemes I absolutely agree, HN people spend too much time bickering about them. But people who wilfully display static content in such a way that people can't see it should be publicly shamed, pour encourager les autres. It's been a solved problem since 1993.

> People are often quick to make the easy critique of something based on irrelevant surface characteristics.

It's not even surface characteristics, it's just the ability to make a comment, to be a participant rather than an observer.

People need their own identities validated, and that is hard to do in a social world of opinions and ideas that is constantly shifting - you can look up information that validates your thoughts and chances are, you can just as easily find information that invalidates those thoughts, and this is eternal and unchanging.

The characteristics of truth seeking on the internet is chaos. There is so much under the surface stuff that goes into fueling ideas and shaping them. If a funny meme can explode in popularity over the internet, why can't an opinion that has no foundation in the facts, but instead it just 'clicks' correctly with a set of minds? It is nonsensical, but yet, it makes sense.

I don't know if it is genuinely easier to criticize something than it is to make a positive or neutral comment. I am interested in whether it is possible to have intelligent and polite discussion last for longer than what seems to be seconds at a time, in public, anonymous forums.

I do know that I have been thinking about developing an intellect that is okay with being confused for extended periods of time, just because it's something that I haven't tried to do in all my years of internet communication and various other kinds of education. I don't know what would happen to the shape of technology, of coding, of ideas, of analysis, if many people at once, gave themselves the chance to breathe, instead of having to constantly digest (or verify against their own) a selected path in a realm of chaotic, loosely connected, incomparable, inconstrastable, unsortable, etc, ideas. I just feel like this constant reaction to preference makes us feel like we are in control, when it's more that our individual control begins to control us.

The shape of reasoning for technology in the contemporary age looks more like that which is irrational and disorderly.

/shrug

There's an 18th century proverb about this:

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

So this is hardly anything new. It's been the status quo for as long as people have been learning. That's partly why people like learning: because it makes them feel powerful and privileged.