[lapcat]

Serious question: Why do Hacker News commenters constantly "tone police" articles that are not written for Hacker News?

I don't know what criticisms of an article's tone contribute to the collective knowledge base.

If an article author did not show the respect toward something that you think something deserves, you're entitled to your personal feelings, but are we here just to say "I like this" or "I don't like that"? It always seems like HN revels in diversions, irrelevancies, and nitpicking, which typically distracts from the main points of an article. As proof of this, the OP is currently the top voted comment for the article, and a similar comment is the 2nd most upvoted.

[acdha]

There are two trends at work here: the most generic is the tendency for clickbait to drown out more substantial work. In this case, the provocative title isn't supported by the contents so it'll leave most readers disappointed.

The second is that there are a lot of HN users who are active open source developers and that community has grown increasingly tired of whining by people who feel entitled to have their opinions shape projects without doing any work to help those projects. Starting with “Brew Is a Bad Neighbor”, he basically craps all over a huge amount of work which hundreds of developers have given him for free and can't even acknowledge things like them having given him the ability to do exactly what he wants – note the little snide parts like “(grudgingly?)” or the way the information presented in the default documentation is described as some kind of secret reveal.

Note that he has _never_ attempted to contribute to either project:

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues?q=author%3A... https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues?q=author%3Apudquick

It's perfectly fine not to contribute to projects you use, or to have strong opinions about how to architect things, but it'll definitely rub people the wrong way to not to contribute but have a “Why Wasn't I Consulted!?!” post.

It's also common for people here to question things because they don't agree that a particular post is worth the community's time. Many of the comments here seem like meta-discussion to the submitter.

[lapcat]

> In this case, the provocative title isn't supported by the contents so it'll leave most readers disappointed.

One problem is with Hacker News itself: it makes no space for context other than an article title.

Whereas the gist was originally posted by the author in a tweet that said "Wrote a guide on how I keep homebrew in its place" and also had a screenshot of some of the article contents. And the people who would see it were those who followed the author (a lot of Mac admins).

HN submitters are not supposed to editorialize an article title. But, maybe HN should make room for an article summary that does editorialize!

Google search results for example have a little summary too, not just a link and a title. So you can make some kind of judgment about the content before clicking.

> it'll definitely rub people the wrong way to not to contribute but have a “Why Wasn't I Consulted!?!” post

How is this one such a post?

To be clear, though, there are some people who only use homebrew because some project requires it, and not because they want to use homebrew. So contributing to homebrew is the last thing they'd want to do, even though they use it sometimes, reluctantly.

It's fairly common for the cheapest thing to become the most popular thing, even if it turns out to be one of the worst things possible. Cheap and free too often crowd out better possibilities. With that in mind, I don't take "they provide it for free" to make something immune from criticism. My unpopular opinion is that there's actually too much open source in the world, and software developers are undermining themselves in the race to the bottom.

> Many of the comments here seem like meta-discussion to the submitter.

Well, I think it's unfair to take that out on the article author, who did not submit it to HN.

For whatever reason, HN does not allow downvoting of articles, only upvoting. I would take that up with dang. :-)

On the other hand, the article does contain useful instructions that are worthwhile for some people.

[plorkyeran]

There isn't really anything else to respond to here. This person doesn't like homebrew but doesn't really say why, so we can't discuss their reasons. The rest of the post is instructions to solve a problem most people don't have, so there isn't really anything to say about those. The end result is that you're left with nothing but tone-policing and people who just read the title and decided to post their unrelated complaints. The tone policing gets upvoted above the latter because it's at least vaguely about the thing we're hypothetically commenting on.

The real question is why it got upvoted given that seemingly no one read it and has anything to say about the content of the post. I'd guess it's the people who just wanted a place to air their unrelated grievances.

[lapcat]

> The real question is why it got upvoted given that seemingly no one read it and has anything to say about the content of the post. I'd guess it's the people who just wanted a place to air their unrelated grievances.

It may be "a problem most people don't have", as you say, but it's still a problem that some people have, and homebrew is used by a lot of people, so another possibility is that people upvoted the article because they found it useful.