I found I started enjoying social media a lot more when I changed my mindset from:
This topic isn't relevant to me thus it shouldn't be here.
to:
This topic isn't relevant to me thus I'll simply ignore it.
I would rather participate in communities that are semi-filtered and rely on me providing a second filter for my own taste. If instead the community tries to filter down entirely to my taste, I find it ends up overfitting and I lose almost all of the serendipitious "I didn't know I was interested in this but wow." articles that I love.
In other words, stuff I don't care about isn't a bug, it's a feature—a side effect of allowing a greater variety of content some of which is interesting but which can't be predicted.
The issue with social media is it is essentially unsolicited. With TV, you tune to "The Discovery Channel", and if you dont like it, you tune to another.
With social media you are invited to react to things as-if they were for you. This is the origin of, i'd say, 90% of the instigating none-sense that causes trouble.
Social media arguments are often just between not-the-audience and the-audience talking past each other. With the former basically saying, "i dont understand this, and its wasting my time"; and the latter saying, "i understand this and its really important".
Sure, some HN comments and their ensuing discussions may be completely unrelated to the posted topic. I've learned a lot from these over the years, and I'm happy to ignore the ones that I don't care about.
But just as there is now a guideline against making irrelevant and unsolicited nitpicky website design complaints, it would be useful to have a guideline against "I thought the article would be about X" types of comments as well. These are similarly pervasive, and of similarly low value. It might be different if they started a discussion about X (power transformers in this case), but they almost never do.
As a counterpoint, I prefer a world where comments are not overly policed. I believe it stifles creativity, and I think comments like yours harm not help the community by making people less comfortable sharing.
While I generally agree with your stance on over-policing, a third of the comments under this article are off-topic. HN is unique in that the community somewhat agrees that discussion should be on-topic and has a lot less tolerance for single-line jokes or sarcasm.
> I think comments like yours harm not help the community by making people less comfortable sharing.
Maybe I am unique in that, but if your contribution to a thread on a deep learning paper is a joke about decepticons or electrical transformers, it's okay to be less comfortable about sharing.
I'd be fine with a joke which somehow manages to pun NN transformers, electrical transformers, and the series about robots. That would be an interesting and sufficiently novel joke. It's high surprisal.
I have no problem policing the low-effort, un-novel, unsurprising, lame quips about expecting other use of the word transformer. It adds nothing of value and dilutes threads. I've gotten downvoted for doing it, most of us have, it's a right of passage, and one that I appreciate, since it makes HN comment threads jam-packed with interesting info.
I interpret these puns as lighthearted feedback to the point that the title is unclear and jargony. Apparently a transformer is some machine learning thing, I'm sure it is an appropriate name for a journal publication where everybody who sees it will be in the field, but to an outsider it is not really obvious what this title is about.
Exactly. The culture of "no" and control-freaks trying to shackle others into thinking down a linear path. This often leads to ideological homogeneity and pushes a large fraction of people away, amplifying homogeneity.
Instead of downvoting or flagging for merely disinterest or disagreement, perhaps there should be some sort of helpful "hide button" in the form of a plus-to-minus sign next to "parent"?
Isn't that why most people become police officers and other authority figures? You'll just have to torture living things, wet the bed, and set fires like the rest of us. /s /s /s /s /s
Don't forget moral panicking, outrage crybullying, serial scapegoats crucifixion, taking-out aggression, bikeshedding, and cyberdisinhibitionism are also part of this complete breakfast.
I just think that the term transformer is overloaded with several meanings - electrical transformer, the cartoon, a transfer function in a NLP neural network and I have heard it used in ETL applications for the transform function. Not fields that are closely related, but still it might result in semantic confusion nonetheless. Similarly term translation has a completely different meaning in mathematics than in linguistics, e.g.