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Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by preommr on Thursday June 25, 2020 @09:07PM (#23647687)
I made an honest effort to read that and I just couldn't.

I actually can't imagine any kind of reading medium that's worse. There's chunks of text interlaced with a bunch of visual noise, random images, links to separate threads which are huge images and bigger than the surrounding text.

Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by dang on Friday June 26, 2020 @02:14AM (#23649210)
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23647028.
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by allzeros on Friday June 26, 2020 @12:02AM (#23648581)
I really, truly wish HN would moderate and remove comments about a link's medium. Every single post here has at least one person complaining about the layout of the source. Every time. It's exhausting. I hate it. It contributes absolutely nothing, and I don't know if anyone's noticed, but people keep using Twitter! Gasp! If you hate Twitter so much, reach out to the tweet author and ask them to publish elsewhere. If you hate Medium, e-mail the author and ask them to switch platforms. But dear God, can we please stop complaining about it in HN comments? Either read it or don't.

Please just stop.

Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by preommr on Friday June 26, 2020 @01:04AM (#23648868)
Then let me add that this is a particularly bad case.

I know there's a user called foone that has gotten posted to HN enough times that they explained why they use twitter to make posts instead of writing a blog (they have adhd, and they find it easier to write on twitter). Which is reasonable since there's an empathical justification. And I've read other twitter threads in the past, which were fine.

Usually, people just write out a paragraph but broken over multiple tweets. This is the first time that I've seen someone try and link other videos/posts/images which is somehow so much worse.

Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by ethanwillis on Friday June 26, 2020 @12:24AM (#23648694)
It's a valid point of discussion. What isn't is you actually complaining. You could take your own advice and write to Dang about the moderation?
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by frandroid on Friday June 26, 2020 @12:29AM (#23648730)
You literally just repeated his own point, but about his comment.
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by Aeolun on Friday June 26, 2020 @12:45AM (#23648806)
If only nobody would write comments on HN we wouldn’t have this problem!
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by Waterluvian on Friday June 26, 2020 @12:53AM (#23648832)
How on earth can this individual’s speech vex you to such an extent that you need it silenced?
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by ardit33 on Friday June 26, 2020 @01:04AM (#23648867)
It adds 0 to the conversation. It is very weird, almost borderline autistic behaviour...

90% of links, have some kind of: "doesn't work on my mobile... format sucks, i don't like the colors, etc... etc.." comment.

It is pure infantile/juvenile bikesheding and distracting from the point of the conversation/link that has nothing to do with formatting.

Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by dang on Friday June 26, 2020 @02:17AM (#23649223)
We could consider adding a guideline asking people not to post such things. The problem is that sometimes such comments are helpful for the owner of a site, who either shared their own work or happened to be on here when someone else did.
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by tptacek on Friday June 26, 2020 @10:32AM (#23652373)
My guess is that's pretty unusual, and that if you looked at a sample of, like, 20 of them, in at least 19 cases whatever was being complained about would remain the case on the website in question, indicating that the site owner did not get value from them. Meanwhile: those comments really are a pox on the threads; it'd be better if users were in the habit of downvoting them to keep the top of the thread clear, which a guideline would accomplish.
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by dang on Friday June 26, 2020 @02:05PM (#23655039)
Care to suggest a wording for it?
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by tptacek on Friday June 26, 2020 @02:28PM (#23655274)
Discuss substance, not presentation, unless presentation is the topic of the story. Comments about web design and readability are off-topic. Advice for authors is best delivered through a polite private email.
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by dang on Saturday June 27, 2020 @02:24AM (#23659913)
Just to calibrate: would you say "this site breaks the back button fuck I fucking hate that" should be under this umbrella?
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by tptacek on Saturday June 27, 2020 @02:46AM (#23659983)
Extremely yes. Sites that break the back button aren't going to stop doing that because HN complains about it, right?
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by dang on Saturday June 27, 2020 @03:27PM (#23664008)
Ok, I added it. A brand new guideline is a rarity. We should have a ceremony.

I worded it more concretely: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances [etc]" I find that giving concrete examples and inviting the mind to generalize them works better than giving an abstract rule and inviting the mind to instantiate it. I learned this trick from spreadsheet development.

I was about to complain bitterly that the guidelines are now too long and there isn't a single one that can be taken out...but then I saw one that could be taken out, and I took it out. That was "Please submit the canonical URL. Avoid link shorteners." It's covered by "Please submit the original source." We added it a few years ago to try to convey that link shorteners are banned on HN, but it can be pushed out of the constitution and down into case law. It's the ones that aren't derivable from other guidelines that are hard to remove.

The list still feels too long to me. The longer it gets, the less people will take in, and I really want to avoid the mistake of accruing a big list of rules over time. They've grown like tree rings (and about as slowly) as we've learned about what feedback helps regulate the system. But the longer the list becomes, the more it starts to feel like a bureaucratic artifact rather than, let's say, a philosophical one, and that is out of sync with the intended spirit. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by isoskeles on Friday June 26, 2020 @01:52AM (#23649103)
Devil's advocating here, because I agree more with your sentiment:

That comment has sparked a larger subthread specifically about Twitter as a medium, rather than the content of the post. This specific subthread is so popular, it's near the top of the page every time I refresh this post. So we could say it stifles discussion, also because people are prone to voting up a comment like that despite the fact that it's not really relevant to the post.

Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by lultimouomo on Friday June 26, 2020 @02:00AM (#23649151)
And that's why the [-] button is so awesome.
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by tomc1985 on Friday June 26, 2020 @12:42AM (#23648794)
Squeaky wheels get the oil. Sorry dude...
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by JohnTHaller on Thursday June 25, 2020 @11:00PM (#23648252)
Twitter is awful for conveying longer text. Here's an unroll of it: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1264341436138270720.html

The key text is: @threadreaderapp unroll

If you reply to a Tweet thread with that, it'll unroll it and create a link like that.

Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by QuercusMax on Thursday June 25, 2020 @11:42PM (#23648460)
You can also just go to the threadreaperapp website and paste in the tweet url.
Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by edw on Thursday June 25, 2020 @09:27PM (#23647822)
Amen. Not to mention the non sequitur replies from randos trying to insert themselves, grasping for fifteen milliseconds of microcelebrity.

I recently read HG Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau; the protagonist describes one of Moreau’s creatures, who specialized in Big Think: big-worded, incoherent rambling intended to confuse and impress in equal parts. The argot of Twitter, in other words.

Re:Quora goes permanently remote-first by warent on Thursday June 25, 2020 @09:32PM (#23647844)