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Comment by tssva | Hacker News Reader

From the title this seems to be a violation of HN guidelines. "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article."

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I wish the addendum to that rule was “because we will just delete their post anyway.”

The lowest value contributions on HN are inevitably those that use a headline to air personal grievances vaguely related to the subject of the post (“Apple releases new cure for diabetes”, top comment: “Let me tell you why I hate the touchbar.”) the second lowest are those that clearly read the headline and ran with it, without reading the content that utterly contradicts what they imagine the article would contain.

Not having read the article / not discussing anything in the darn article should absolutely be grounds for criticism.

Hey, can I tell you about how Firefox uses too much of my battery and is made by Mozilla Foundation who I will never donate to in a million years and why the person who gave me my last whiteboard interview probably clubs seals? Oh, you're telling me the article was about performance improvements in IonMonkey and how in-person interviews overwhelmingly fail to pick African American applicants?

Drives me mad. Any Hacker News discussion has an extremely strong push towards the same couple dozen topics that anyone can relate to, and commenters who drag the conversation in that direction for no good reason are doing the thread a disservice.

I wish Hacker News would remove that rule and replace it with two:

1) Please read the article before you comment.

2) If you haven't read the article, please refrain from commenting.

It wouldn't accomplish much, but it will at least prioritize engagement over politeness, as the current rule does. And yes, both of those are the same thing but I feel it's worth mentioning twice.

I believe the reason for that rule is to avoid polluting the thread with "did you even read" type remarks. Starting an argument won't help the thread recover from an uninformed comment.

Nothing in the rules discourages downvoting people who didn't read.

Surely the lowest of the low are "why is this on the front page?"?

No, it's not. It's a criticism of posting habits on Twitter and it's not terrible.

Writing an article about bad habits in cyberspace where the title of your piece vaguely calls to mind some guideline in some forum and appears to contradict it is not somehow a violation of that guideline.

As someone with eyesight issues and a demographic outlier for HN who, thus, sees life different from most people here, it's sort of common for people to think I didn't read something when I did, I just missed a detail or I did, I just have a different education and life experience and see something different in it.

And that's one of the reasons you shouldn't say that to someone directly. You are assuming something ugly, basically.

But talking about how reading the article before expressing your opinion is a best practice is unrelated to that detail of etiquette.

The title is the verbatim title of the linked article and the article is about the topic of people not reading papers when discussing them. I don't see how you'd come to the conclusion it's an inappropriate title.

The comment was a joke but I still suggest rereading it because even if it wasn't nowhere in it did I suggest the presence of an inappropriate title.

I appreciated your joke

Thanks. Based upon the comments and downvotes no one else did, but honestly I'm not surprised.

Sorry. I seem to miss dry humor a lot in person and humor is more challenging online.

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