[btilly]

I see you your personal observations of Reddit and raise you my 20 years of online discussions in many different kinds of forums, from usenet to email to a variety of websites.

In that time I've consistently found that people who try to set meta rules are a bigger drag on communities like this than occasional offbeat stories with no strong tie to the community. The remit of this site is supposed to be things of interest to hackers. Clearly a lot of hackers find this story interesting, and are interested to hear the end of it.

Speaking personally, I don't follow a lot of news aggregators at the moment, and so am glad that it appeared here.

[TheCowboy]

HN has clearly defined 'meta rules' that have been casually and sometimes not so casually enforced since its inception.

It seems like we have an equal number of decades of experience, and it also doesn't matter either way. It's irrelevant and a logical fallacy in itself.

[mrobataille]

So, where's your rules list?

[davidw]

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is pretty good.

[btilly]

Those rules I happily agree with. I also think that the original article fits within those rules. And, "Sparks conversation that cannot be found elsewhere on the Internet" is not among those rules.

And that is enough navel gazing for me tonight.