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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

"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."

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

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The website is made to show you how much time you have left, to highlight that time is precious. To get this reminder, you have to enter your date through a date picker. This date picker is cumbersome, and makes you waste time. I think this is not a tangential annoyance, but a central one. Those two things are in opposition, and this detracts a lot from the message of this website. If time is so precious, why is my time wasted by an unknown file picker with a foreign interface?

You have a point, but it's still pretty tangential at a macro level. The main macro-level thing is that the thread at the top of a page should be responding to the core of the story—or on rare occasions, be something surprising and even more interesting than the story.

The UX of a date picker on the page doesn't clear that bar. That doesn't mean it's unimportant, just that the top of an HN page is not the appropriate context for it. Unless, of course, the story is about the UX of date pickers!

That's fair, thanks for the clarification. Would that clear the bar if that post was a Show HN? I feel like one of the problem here is that the author isn't here to listen to the feedback anyways, so anything that is "feedback" isn't very interesting.

Hmm - that's a bit harder to say. It still shouldn't be the top comment in that case though.

Thanks again, and thanks for all your hard work on the moderation!

Apologies dang, I regret the post. Quite right pushing it to the bottom where it rightly should be.

The problem, of course, is more with the upvotes than the original comment. But we can't really address the problem at that level.

I suppose we could let people mark their own comments off topic, which would drop them to the bottom of the page...

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