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Comment by kr7 | Hacker News Reader

The title is somewhat misleading. The suburbs are not dying; in fact they are growing [1][2][3][4] and this article makes no claim to the contrary.

The article is saying that suburbs are becoming more like urban areas.

I like the author's evidence that housing prices are falling:

> In that same city in 2012, a typical McMansion would be valued at $477,000, about 274% more than the area's other homes. Today, a McMansion would be valued at $611,000, or 190% above the rest of the market.

Up 28% in price - must be dying!

[1] http://time.com/107808/census-suburbs-grow-city-growth-slows...

[2] http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/03/2015-us-population-wi...

[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-moving-to-suburbs-r...

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/09/26/americas-...

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The point of that comparison is separating the value of the lot from the value of the house sitting on that lot. The property value isn't going down, but the value of the home is dropping considerably.

The misleading thing may be that this is just standard depreciation, although I wouldn't be surprised if houses in the 3000-5000 sq.ft. bracket were depreciating faster than smaller houses. (Though it seems likely these numbers they stated were the simplest way they could find to say that they are depreciating at an unusually fast rate.)

I'm not sure I follow that logic. Lot value is difficult to assess and frequently wrong from an assessment standpoint.

The cost to tear down a McMansion that isn't depreciated way is very high, making the lots value questionable. Additionally, since tract housing is often identical in most ways, if your neighbors homes are going to shit and depreciating, that will impact the lot value too.

I think by "dying" they mean "hip yuppie white Millennials don't live there [yet]." Nobody else counts.

The entire series has such hyperbolic language. I know that's BI's thing, but to treat the closing of shopping malls as a cultural apocalypse is surreal.

That struck me too. Pretty amusing. I think there is definitely a trend against the mis-happen McMansion, though. I attribute it to times when home building was booming and demand was outstripping supply for homes of that size. The result was that people were willing to accept, or just didn't even know, that the architecture was a little "off". So when space > aesthetics in a buyer's mind "good enough" was, well... good enough.

Ok, we changed the title to a subheading from the article.

The title is not misleading: The suburbs as we know them are dying.

I think you are misreading it to mean something it does not say.

Sure. Not clickbaity at all. Let's make a new article: Computers as we know them are dying.

Edit: You might want to revise your definition of misleading. Misleading doesn't mean something is factually false. It means it's true but is presented in a way to lead you into believing something else. So you can feed a narrative without lying.

Computers as we know them are, in fact, dying. This is a genuine pain point for some people, while being an opportunity for others.

Click-baity and misleading are not the same thing. Having a title that gets people to look at all is necessary to get traffic. This is true even on HN, in spite of how much people decry the evils of click-bait titles. It is incredibly hard to title things excellently well, such that it gets traffic but won't get labeled as "evil, nefarious click-bait with some dirty agenda" by the HN crowd.

I do freelance writing and I blog and I submit stuff to HN regularly. My view of this is not rooted in stupidity. It is rooted in knowing that click-bait titles work to get views and can get your article flagged to death even if the article per se is an excellent piece of writing, yet trying too hard to not be click-bait can mean you get very few views and no upvotes.

Titling things well is hard. I see nothing nefarious in how this is titled and I have too much firsthand experience with how incredibly critical HN is. The criticisms here are to the point of being neurotic and cranky. It is not merely a case of placing a high value on excellence.

>Computers as we know them are, in fact, dying.

My point exactly.

I was not critising click baiting, or the article. I was simply pointing out that the title was in fact misleading and exaggerating by using semantic tricks. I used the term click bait because in that particular case, the author was not trying to lie, but rather simply make their title have more impact.

Telling me that I might want to revise my definition of misleading is essentially calling me stupid. You aren't the OP to whom I replied, the mods changed the title already, AND my first comment was down voted into the negatives. So, this looks like a gratuitous personal attack to me. You doubling down looks even more petty.

It is no wonder dang feels HN has a civility problem and hoped he could cure it by doing a political detox week, which did not work because it wasn't the issue.

I'm sorry if you got downvoted because of me. My cynism is probably the cause.

However, if you think having an argument is calling you stupid and is a personal attack then this is your own problem.

I had upvoted your comments and I liked your reply. It doesn't mean I agree with you, and it doesn't mean Im here to get you neither.

Article titles are and will always be a problem on HN. This won't change, all we can do is try to point out when there is a problem with them and then immediately complain when the mods editorialised them a little bit much.

Arguing and calling someone stupid are not the same thing. I can make the distinction. Telling me it is my problem is another personal attack. I stand by my statement that your remarks here fail to meet a standard of civility.

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