[aussiesnack]

As pvg won't permit a reply to his/her/its post, I'll reply to myself:

> The guideline is there because of the repetitive twitter complaints, I'm not making this > up as a fun messageboard hypothetical. Complaining about tweets being on twitter is a > well-established off-topic topic.

This is very obviously untrue. Almost every single thread in HN is littered with repetitive comments. Try posting anything about Linux, note-taking. Dare mention an Electron app, and if it's installed with an install.sh, then .. instant death. You'll be buried under an avalanche of near exact copies of comments that have been posted tens of thousands of times on HN.

This is manifest bad faith on the part of the mods in general or pvg in particular: an individual dislike on their part of this particular repetitive complaint, which prompted a vague guideline with plausible deniability in mind.

These aren't the kind of judiciously-applied guidelines I could willingly sign up to. Unfortunately we're not permitted to delete accounts here, so I'll remove my email address, log out, and stay out of the comments.

[tptacek]

Comments about formatting tangents are especially repetitive and don't earn their keep by bringing anything valuable to the thread; complaining about tweet threading is pissing in the wind: people aren't going to stop threading (or boldfacing the wrong text, or setting things white-on-black background, or using 200MB font stacks, or breaking the back button) just because some person on a message board gripes about it. Beelow is a link to the 'dang comments about this, there's no uncertainty, and you should stop pretending like there's a live debate about whether HN welcomes comments about tweet threading on stories that aren't about tweet threading. It does not.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It's worth knowing that HN is a common law system, not a civil law one: there's the guidelines page, and then there's a long history of moderator interpretations and addenda, and to grok the totality of our rules, you need both. Think of the guidelines like the Constitution, and Dan as the Supreme Court.

Edit

This comment was originally snottier and stated that someone had already posted the mod comment link, but, nope, I was just wrong about that, and I do apologize. Chagrin is a powerful decongestant and so I'll be less snotty in the future.

[pvg]

I was just wrong about that

You weren't, it just that this thread got a little out of whack with the self-reply-because-reply-link-was-hidden thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271184

[pvg]

As pvg won't permit

I'm a regular user here, I don't permit or not permit things. Click on the timestamp of a comment next time to reply to it if the reply button is hidden.

This is very obviously untrue

I mean, complaining about things being on twitter is offtopic on HN which I've gone to exhaustive and exhausting lengths to explain. You can't just declare it untrue, that would be, as you say, a personal preference of yours rather than the reality.