[munificent]

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.

[mjburgess]

This is a very important point.

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".

[kevinskii]

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.