Hi, I wrote the grandparent (and later deleted it to try to save my karma).
Making the comment was an interesting experience from a meta-HN perspective: I expressed a contrarian view (basically questioning why this article is HN material). Despite getting downvoted several times, my comment generated some informative posts, like the parent -- relevant facts and opinions about the article's context and meaning, that's missing from the article itself.
Despite losing some karma to it just now, I like the downvoting system. But I don't think that we as a community want to suppress well-worded, cogently argued opinions that generate informative replies, just because they're unpopular.
So please, make an effort to not downvote things just because you disagree with them, and pro-actively upvote high-quality comments that have been downvoted without merit.
It'll make HN a better place if we, as a community, reserve downvotes to censure people who truly deserve it.
I can't remember the exact wording of your original comment, however I do remember a phrase like "wall of text" regarding the inclusion of "to be or not to be" and expressing dismay over the number of positive votes it had accumulated.
In my mind I found it to be not only contrarian, but disrespectful to the author. One could concede that it did spark informative responses, but I would argue that a more serious attempt should be made to absorb the article's own message before trying to refute it.
> I expressed a contrarian view (basically questioning why this article is HN material).
It was contrarian; not interesting. (I think the article being on HN makes it HN material.) I find people around here not trigger happy with the interesting.
> I think the article being on HN makes it HN material
Our culture is what we collectively make it, by definition.
But I don't want to see the frontpage filled with articles about suicide, depression, and celebrity gossip -- that's not what I'm looking to read when I get on HN! And I assumed that others felt as I did, so seeing this upvoted to #2 on the frontpage, I was a bit shocked that my assumptions had been violated.
It's fine if we occasionally discuss those things when there's some (potentially nebulous) link to HN's core topics -- a blog by a celebrity making a foray into programming, a discussion of suicide after a well-known startup founder takes his/her own life, or the technological underpinnings of an innovative treatment for depression are definitely linked to topics of broad interest to HN.
But I didn't really see any link between this article and any of those things. And that's what I meant by "not HN material."
> But I don't want to see the frontpage filled with articles about suicide, depression, and celebrity gossip -- that's not what I'm looking to read when I get on HN! And I assumed that others felt as I did, so seeing this upvoted to #2 on the frontpage, I was a bit shocked that my assumptions had been violated.
So flag it. if others agree with you, they will too. If they don't, maybe it is not really your culture, then? It is just an online forum; there will be others.
Making the comment was an interesting experience from a meta-HN perspective: I expressed a contrarian view (basically questioning why this article is HN material). Despite getting downvoted several times, my comment generated some informative posts, like the parent -- relevant facts and opinions about the article's context and meaning, that's missing from the article itself.
Despite losing some karma to it just now, I like the downvoting system. But I don't think that we as a community want to suppress well-worded, cogently argued opinions that generate informative replies, just because they're unpopular.
So please, make an effort to not downvote things just because you disagree with them, and pro-actively upvote high-quality comments that have been downvoted without merit.
It'll make HN a better place if we, as a community, reserve downvotes to censure people who truly deserve it.