One question is how would you categorize them. It could be some combination of software, user input, and moderator action, and there are problems with all three.

I would use the word 'generic' rather than 'meta'. Generic includes meta but also all other predictable themes, and a subthread that goes off-topic isn't necessarily bad—whimsical tangents can be interesting when unpredictable, as long as they're not done too often (at which point they'd count as generic).

We downweight generic subthreads and the current certainly counts as that, but I haven't downweighted it in this case because it seemed more important to communicate to the community about this.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

That sounds amazing!

That would get the content separated from the noise. I'd love it. The problem with these meta topics is that they are like the bike shed problem--emotionally driven, easy to get sucked into, everyone has an opinion, but ultimately, a distraction that takes away from the important stuff.

Here's an implementation. We have up and down voting. Let me vote these sideways.

This would be a left arrow, which hides them for me--conceptually like kicking them off the screen--and if a quorum develops past a threshold, by default for anyone with "meta" turned off.

I have gotten so much more information reading the comments than the article.

A lot of the "meta" is useful to me.

I come here for the comments, and like all the comments, even most of the silenced blurry ones.

Sometimes it sounds like a echo chamber, but I like the diversity of this crowd.

I think most of the regulars here realize HN has some strong rules. A bit too strong for myself, so I refrain from saying what I really feel.

I think most of us know the culture at Hacker News. Would I like to see the boundaries expanded--yes, but I understand most of you are afraid of this site becoming Reddit, and so am I.

A bunch of niceties over a article, or controversial subject, is not helpful to me.

(More meta coming up. Does anyone know the exact source code to HN. I've seen the old source code at Git. I'm looking for something current. I want to learn Lisp, and programming a site I like would be nice. Or, is there another language better suited (I guess more libraries) that would be a better fit for a HN clone?)

Well, a lot of what you describe as meta (e.g. "this page is unreadable") is explicitly against the site guidelines, and much of the rest is more-or-less implicitly against the guidelines (ie, HN is for discussions which gratify intellectual curiosity).

The right thing to do is to downvote it. If you can't downvote comments yet, well, they'll usually get downvoted by others soon enough. IMO, the nice thing about HN is that for all that it's imperfect, compared to most of the internet the community moderation (and official moderation) works very well!

There are also comments that are perhaps not exactly related to the story, but are adjacent enough to be on-topic or arise naturally from conversation. It's natural for conversations to move between topics, and many of these discussions are super interesting!

I would say you're too focused on the legitimate-vs.-illegitimate binary. HN's goal is to be interesting, a.k.a. to gratify curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). For that we want comments that are thoughtful, substantive, and above all unpredictable.

Can there be comments which are legitimate but nevertheless also predictable, unthoughtful, unsubstantive? Sure there can. We don't need those here. They don't affect threads in a good way.

Can there be comments which are illegitimate, but nevertheless manage to be thoughtful/substantive/unpredictable? Surely this must also be possible. Such comments could well make for interesting conversation, in which case they'd be fine.

There's no rule requiring commenters to be right (which is handy, since to a first approximation we're all wrong about everything and rarely have any idea what we're talking about—this is what they used to call "the human condition"). When people approach conversation with a strong need to be right, that doesn't lead to curious conversation, it leads to the situation in the famous xkcd classic.

I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter and certainly not that people should just bullshit. Bullshit is a lot less interesting and more predictable than it assumes it is. I'm saying that an open-minded, exploratory, conversational way of looking for the truth yields best results here, and trying to categorize things as legitimate vs. illegitimate isn't in that spirit. As for "legitimate denouncements", god help us, that covers every denouncement ever made, as far as the denouncer was concerned.

You gave me a headache

Do you have any ideas for how that could be done on HN? What about Twitter UX in particular do you think leads to that dynamic?

Are you sure you're not just weighing that heavily based on how frustrated you are by a given piece of marketing and thus heavily over-counting the "bad" marketing and under-counting the huge amount of marketing that doesn't stand out and frustrate you?

99% of marketERS are bad.

Only like...80% of marketing is bad.

> The people trying to sell products have every incentive to lie and mislead potential consumers.

Absolutely not, unless your business model relies on single sales.

In functioning organizations with actual products, marketing and sales are advocacy functions for the customer as much as they are revenue functions for the business. They're how you know what to make and who to target.

Word of mouth works, but can be very slow and still faces the problem of getting those first users. Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion? At some point the word has to reach someone who can actually spread it before anything will happen. So many awesome products and services die because they aren't flashy or cool enough to drive viral word of mouth spread.

I'm quite familiar with this, as my reverse image search service SauceNAO has never done any kind of paid marketing. It took years for users to spread the word to any significant degree. Even now, nearly 13 years later, there are many people who would benefit from it greatly who have never even heard of us...

Word of mouth is something you can optimize for. Multi-level marketing schemes and social networks both do this.

I would prefer companies to focus on landing page quality than to start altering the product to turn customers into salesfolks.

Marketing is no more inherently trustworthy than any other form of communication. Of course it's important to have some personal ability to detect deceit, and it's also important to have systems in place to disincentivize deceit. But the fact is that, when such systems are not in place or are not sufficiently strong, of course there are many cases where people are incentivized to lie with any form of communication.

I almost did here, for the reasons stated.

I very much would have ignored it on Twitter ;)

Glad I did not here.

A dev in my department is doing a POC to demonstrate the relationship between the quantifiable readability (albeit in Japanese) of a company’s securities filings and that company’s financial performance. That project, and the nngroup link you kindly shared make me think readability is a legitimately important consideration when designing a landing page as the OP is suggesting.

> MUDs were before my time, but I have a friend that claims to have spent hundreds of hours playing these text-based games.

> Addiction is a human issue and isn't limited to one form or another.

For me it was newsgroups. (Sure, I read them in a Windows-based Usenet reader, but it was the contents that were addictive, and that was all text.)

The roaster became the roastee

"I'll get to the recipe in a minute, but first let me tell you about the time I dropped a penny into the Trevi Fountain in Rome. You see, I had just broken up with my first boyfriend and..."

F%(*ing insufferable madness

Copyright. The recipe itself can't be copyrighted, but the descriptive text around it can. This created a style in print media that carried over into the online world.

It wasn't written for search.

Nobody googles titles like 'what I learnt'

The blog post shares every single insight I learnt reviewing landing pages and running my business without any SEO implemented at all.

This used to be the case but Google is getting much better at understanding topics and how they relate to each other. These days, writing good quality content that is comprehensive is best for humans and Google. Sure there is some gaming of the system but it's not like it used to be

TFA (thanks for answering).

Similar to how RTFM stands for "Read The Fabulous Manual"

I don't know why you got downvoted because this is a good idea.

The only criticism I have is that usually the dotted underline is associated with adwords on some sites. I don't know if there's a better way to do it. Superscript question marks at the end of the phrase?