It breaks the site guidelines to post shallow dismissals of other people's experience, so please don't. Taking HN threads into ideological flamewar is even worse, so please don't either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Knowing a person is a perfectly cromulent reason to say something in a conversation. Conversations is all HN threads are. Anecdotes are great for conversation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).