"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."
The greater problem is the upvotes which tend to push these things to the top of a thread, where they choke out interesting discussion. But it's harder to do anything about the upvotes.
I appreciate the reminder of the rules dang, but this literally blocks the article and people are unable to read the submissions. And the fact it gets upvotes means it’s a valid concern.
I agree that it's a valid concern. The trouble is that there's a competing valid concern, namely that such comments routinely get upvoted to the top of threads whenever the OP contains an annoyance (which is often!). Then they tend to sit at the top, choking out more interesting discussion.
Since there are competing concerns, we have to decide how to weight them. For this, it is helpful to know what one is optimizing for. On HN, we're optimizing for intellectual curiosity [1]. Common/generic annoyances are generally less interesting than specific new information in an article, so we favor the latter over the former.
It's not that the other concern is invalid, just a lesser priority relative to what we're optimizing for. Optimization is knowing how to rank valid things. It's easy to drop invalid ones.
You can't go by upvotes alone. Some categories of comment routinely get more upvotes than they should, relative to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This is a weakness of the voting system [2].
This was helpful, thanks. I'm not the OP, but I once was scolded for posting a nitpick like the one being discussed here. I won't do it again, but I did feel like the OP that sometimes it is called for. I see your justification now and agree with it.
