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Comment by yholio | Hacker News Reader

Minor nitpick with the website: what's with the subscribe overlay that can't be closed on mobile? it's so annoying i had to navigate away.

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> Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Btw we made that guideline a bit more general recently:

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

I expect it can be generalized further still, but I wanted to make it unambiguously cover the generic flamewars about things like "why is this on Twitter instead of a blog", since those come up a lot and are super repetitive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hmm, if I may offer my two cents—while I like what you’re trying to do there I think you’ve made the guidelines less clear. Until you called out Twitter threads explicitly, I didn’t see the connection. And I’m actually still not sure what “name collision” means.

I have no helpful suggestions on how to make this clearer, unfortunately.

I'm guessing "name collision" is the "I thought this was about [something else]" comment.

E.g., an article about Pliny the Elder and people saying "I thought it was about beer". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160573

That's a perfect example. Another would be "why do people pick ungoogleable names" or generally any shallow-predictable comment about the name of a thing rather than the thing itself. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29449955 (not to pick on that commenter!)

Thanks, that makes sense! I still don’t think that’s anywhere near obvious enough for the guidelines, however.

If people post the endlessly repeated "I hate reading blog posts on Twitter when they should be a blog", that's a complaint about website formats, no? I don't want to make these things overly specific!

This seems like a bug, though. And this guideline is about general complaining about webdesign, where the design choices of the creators are not align with the users preferences.

[flagged]

There's a place for it. Namely, the email of whoever wrote the piece. Not a discussion site. Spamming complaints on HN only serves to lower the quality of discussion.

The point is that ranting about it here can't directly fix the problem. Sure, it can keep the topic of accessible/usable web development in people's minds, but it likely already is for most web developers using this site. Where a specific page/site is concerned, the person to complain to is the operator of the site hosting the relevant content - i.e., the person/group who can actually do something about it.

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