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Comment by wittyreference | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?"?

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