Bungie, another tech company, has been making this exact request of its community for years now, and their community has for years now found every excuse under the sun to ignore it. Bungie asks “tell us what’s broken, tell us what feels wrong”, and their community responds instead “recurring feature request X, cynical dismissal of intentions”, and then complains that bugs aren’t getting fixed in Bungie’s products. This self-fulfilling prophecy of refusal, complaint, and outrage repeats on an annual cycle, and yet these users continue to ignore pleas for useful feedback.

As of when I posted this comment, most of HN’s discussion of this post is a stellar example of this Internet forum social behavior. Safari asks “tell us what’s buggy and broken, not about recurring feature requests”, and this community is responding with “recurring feature request X, cynical dismissal of intentions”. There are three or four actual real bug reports in this discussion, but they’re drowned out by the non-curious ‘feature’ and ‘cynical’ repetition.

I’m kind of disappointed that they got a hundred plus viable bug reports on Twitter, but only a couple from HN. Given how much so many of us sneer at Twitter, it’s upsetting to see Twitter dramatically outshine us technically. We’re Hacker News, this ought to be a piece of cake.

For example: I wish that Elon Musk wasn’t prideful and troll-y online (these are feature requests that his personality team has refused us), but if he asked me to name a bug in Tesla’s cars that he isn’t aware of, I’d point out that Tesla cars allow you to drive at unsafe speeds when the fog lights are turned on, which is wasting untold megawatts of Supercharger time per year because drivers either don’t know that fog lights aren’t effective above a certain speed and because there’s no chime or automatic-off setting to prevent energy waste. Yes, Elon’s a jerk, and yes, I have feature requests and cynicism about that — but I’d leap for the opportunity to even have a chance at posting one paragraph that cuts all Teslas’ watts per mile by any amount at all. I wish others here found that as rewarding as I do.