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0 pointsalterom1mo ago0 comments

>Yes, because the post isn’t about Discord.

I love the mental gymnastics it takes to say that an article titled "Discord: A case study in performance optimization", which describes what Discord is, talks about Discord's architecture, and lauds it as "a finely-tuned system that delivers speed, scale, and reliability" isn't aKsHuAlLy about Discord.

>Hacker News always devalues generic comments like those

First: you are not Hacker News, please don't speak for others. Some people did find my comment relevant. They are just as much Hacker News as you are.

Second: my comment wasn't generic. It pointed out that the timing of this article is conspicuous given the news that, at the moment of writing that comment, were not discussed widely on HN.

Since then, someone has posted the exact link I mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021421

So, sorry, but reality disagrees with your assessment of it.

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saagarjha1mo ago

I understand your indignation but I assure you that this is an actual category of comment that is considered to be low quality on this site. It is so common and damaging that there are special tools to downweight them, because they stifle curious conversation by getting upvotes while providing little value. I didn’t design this policy, so I don’t really feel comfortable sharing the exact details of how it is applied, but if you are curious the moderators would probably be happy to do so. The very thing you think I am being absurd about is exactly the hallmark of these “generic” comments: they pattern match on some keyword or the title or the post and then pull the conversation away from the topic being discussed, which is specific, into an easier and more general discussion on something tangentially related but predictable. Here’s a lampoon of this which happens any time Apple appears in the headline for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23003595

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