I'd love a place where I can grok and find only useful info. Comments like this don't help.
> The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting: gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter.
It's true that the comment was a bit fluffy, but it's also the sort of whimsical tangent that is in the spirit of this site, which is intellectual curiosity.
Intellectual curiosity often takes up seemingly trivial details and plays with them for no particular reason. Mostly nothing important comes of it, but sometimes something really does. In any case it would be a big mistake to try to push that kind of thing out of here—it's well within the scope of what HN exists for.
It would be one thing if that was the only fluffy comment. The entire collection of top level comments is nothing but fluff, with only one or two exceptions. The vast majority of comments on this page are completely off topic. There is practically zero technical merit to any of the threads, even the on topic ones.
I think it was unfortunate that this generic landing page was chosen as the golden submission and other more specific and more technical submissions (such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14360653) were duped off the front page. If a more specific article had been chosen instead, we might have had a more focused technical discussion rather than domain name commentary and the same old non-specific privacy concerns discussed ad nauseam every day.
> it was unfortunate that this generic landing page was chosen
You know what, you're exactly right. Generic pages lead to generic discussion and that is uninteresting. We're well aware of that effect, so usually make a point of penalizing generic portal-style pages or changing the HN URLs to more substantive ones. For some reason we missed this case.
It's interesting as yet another demonstration of how reliable that effect is, I guess. Initial conditions have a huge impact on HN threads. First comment is another.
People are welcome to downvote my comment, though the quote you cite is referring to links, not as much comments.
> The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "LOL!" or worse still, "That's retarded!" teach us nothing.
As you may have noticed, there are a couple of comments regarding the use of the .ai TLD. A legitimate conversation can be held on whether or not .ai should be generalized for "Artificial Intelligence", possibly to the detriment of people in Anguilla.
The only site on the internet that will meet your requirements of "a place where I can grok and find only useful info" is one you write yourself. What you consider to be "useful info" is going to differ from what other people think.
And, of course, you should consider that your comment is, if anything, a more egregious example of a useless comment, detracting from the conversation.
You can hide comments with the [-] symbol. Use it.
Some advice: When you're new to a place, it's better to stay quiet on the sidelines until you figure out the norms. Calling out the people who've been around much longer does not make a good first impression.
Mini-moderation (and, FWIW, complaints about voting) tend to be received worse than infractions around here. Downvote (you can't yet; you can at 500 karma) and move on.
I'd love a place where I can grok and find only useful info. Comments like this don't help.
> The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting: gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter.