[jsnell]

Nobody reading HN needs to be made aware of it, and those are the only people you'll be able to reach with a HN comment.

The thing is, these repetitive comments get spammed dozens of times on every Google-related post. They could be posted without reading the submission. Many of them probably are in fact probably posted just based on the title (seeing how many people posted basically exactly the same comments into a submission today that wasn't even about a product). These comments completely crowd out any other discussion just due to sheer volume.

There's 90 comments on this thread at the moment. Maybe like 5 are discussing anything about the article itself. The rest are just totally predictable and generic comments, which is something the comment guidelines specifically ask to avoid. (And yes, I'm now also participating in that.)

Now, fair enough. Maybe there really is nothing to be said about the concept of the product. There's definitely not much to be said yet about the execution given nobody here will have been able to use it, so that definitely limits the scope of meaningful discussion to be had. But since the spam won out, we'll never find out.

If there's nothing of substance to talk about, we could just talk about nothing and let the obviously boring and uninteresting submission die in silence.

And if you need to warn your family and friends not to use this product because you think it will be cancelled too soon, you'll probably reach them more effectively via methods other than HN.

[vogon_laureate]

The HN Guidelines[1] also say that commenters should:

"Respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Just because people have posted similar comments about Google's penchant for killing projects, doesn't mean that they are "spamming". Consider, instead, that it may just reflect a groundswell of opinion borne out of bitter experience and disappointment about the company's record and their genuine concerns that this is yet one more tombstone in the expanding Google graveyard.[2]

  [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  [2]: https://gcemetery.co/

[jsnell]

Sure, let's take it as a given that everyone who posts wholly original messages about "lol this product will be canceled" are doing so purely because of the harm they have personally suffered due to a product cancellation, and they just missed the previous messages on that subject. So what? It's still turned this thread into a wasteland and prevented any productive discussion.

Posting in good faith isn't a free pass to post off-topic, repetitive ir low-effort stuff. Just think about what the outcome of that kind of policy would be if applied across the board.

For example, a lot of people have very strong opinions on divisive political issues. Should they be picking submissions that are tangentially related to those issues and hijacking the comments section for discussion about that subject? No, of course not. And I'm not saying that because I disagree with their hypothetical political opinions. I'm saying it because if that becomes the norm, we can't have a discussion about the actual thing that 200 people thought was interesting enough to upvote, because all the discussion will be a retread of that political issue.

It's as if Rust evangelists posted comments about "this bug would never happen in Rust" in response to a technical deep dive to a security bug. Yes, I'm sure they'd be right. Yes, I'm sure they'd be posting that in good faith. There's even a small chance they'd be posting it because they think there's still HN readers who haven't heard the good word of Rust. But it'd also be a shallow comment, variations of which would be posted hundreds of times, and totally generic in that the exact same comment could have been posted to any of a hundred other submissions about a security issue.

[vogon_laureate]

> So what? It's still turned this thread into a wasteland and prevented any productive discussion.

How exactly has it "prevented any productive discussion"? I've seen plenty of comments about the merits and limitations of its Bard foundation, the design choices, the potential business model, etc.

The example you give of political opinions doesn't feel like a fair comparison. We're talking about the company's record on supporting its projects in the context of a new project announcement not a divisive socio-political controversy.

A better example might be: If Red Hat announced a new open source initiative, would it not be relevant to bring up concerns about its commitment to the new FOSS project in light of the impacts its recent announcement about CentOS is having on other companies and projects that depended on it?

[kweingar]

My favorite were comments on a post about Google Zanzibar, which is an internal Google infrastructure thing that they published a research paper about. Other companies started adopting that method, and there were HN comments warning about Google killing products. I don't think Google is going to cancel a research paper!