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Re:What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages by tshaddox on Thursday May 13, 2021 @08:21PM (#27149185)
Is the solution that no one ever issues legitimate criticism, or that no one ever posts anything worthy of legitimate criticism? Personally, I don't find it ironic or hypocritical when people issue legitimate criticism of anything, including legitimate criticism of the preponderance of illegitimate criticism on this website. These are not two instances of "the same negativity." Issuing legitimate denouncements of people who are issuing illegitimate denouncements is not "the problem recreating itself." This is pretty much a textbook example of the paradox of intolerance.
Re:What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages by dang on Friday May 14, 2021 @07:22PM (#27160707)
I would say you're too focused on the legitimate-vs.-illegitimate binary. HN's goal is to be interesting, a.k.a. to gratify curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). For that we want comments that are thoughtful, substantive, and above all unpredictable.

Can there be comments which are legitimate but nevertheless also predictable, unthoughtful, unsubstantive? Sure there can. We don't need those here. They don't affect threads in a good way.

Can there be comments which are illegitimate, but nevertheless manage to be thoughtful/substantive/unpredictable? Surely this must also be possible. Such comments could well make for interesting conversation, in which case they'd be fine.

There's no rule requiring commenters to be right (which is handy, since to a first approximation we're all wrong about everything and rarely have any idea what we're talking about—this is what they used to call "the human condition"). When people approach conversation with a strong need to be right, that doesn't lead to curious conversation, it leads to the situation in the famous xkcd classic.

I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter and certainly not that people should just bullshit. Bullshit is a lot less interesting and more predictable than it assumes it is. I'm saying that an open-minded, exploratory, conversational way of looking for the truth yields best results here, and trying to categorize things as legitimate vs. illegitimate isn't in that spirit. As for "legitimate denouncements", god help us, that covers every denouncement ever made, as far as the denouncer was concerned.