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Btw we made that guideline a bit more general recently:

"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."

I expect it can be generalized further still, but I wanted to make it unambiguously cover the generic flamewars about things like "why is this on Twitter instead of a blog", since those come up a lot and are super repetitive.

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




Hmm, if I may offer my two cents—while I like what you’re trying to do there I think you’ve made the guidelines less clear. Until you called out Twitter threads explicitly, I didn’t see the connection. And I’m actually still not sure what “name collision” means.

I have no helpful suggestions on how to make this clearer, unfortunately.


I'm guessing "name collision" is the "I thought this was about [something else]" comment.

E.g., an article about Pliny the Elder and people saying "I thought it was about beer". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160573


That's a perfect example. Another would be "why do people pick ungoogleable names" or generally any shallow-predictable comment about the name of a thing rather than the thing itself. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29449955 (not to pick on that commenter!)


Thanks, that makes sense! I still don’t think that’s anywhere near obvious enough for the guidelines, however.


If people post the endlessly repeated "I hate reading blog posts on Twitter when they should be a blog", that's a complaint about website formats, no? I don't want to make these things overly specific!




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