[saagarjha]

Honest question, does anyone appreciate these “case studies”? It seems like they’re always based on some random quote and they go way in detail on what the various technologies are and how they might possibly apply to the subject in question, but with almost no real insight besides “I think this is how it might work”. What kind of case study is that?! If you don’t have real examples how is this better than just presenting the original source for the quote and Wikipedia links to the various technical terms?

[alterom]

>Honest question, does anyone appreciate these “case studies”?

I, for one, do not.

But great that we get into some guy's ideation about how Discord is possibly cool, while it's undergoing a major scandal related to ties to Peter Thiel's surveillance company, Palantir, in the botched rollout of age verification[1].

My personal guess is that appearance of articles that paint Discord in a positive light on this forum (and lack substance otherwise) is simply PR.

[1] https://kotaku.com/discord-palantir-peter-thiel-persona-age-...

[saagarjha]

I don't really think your comment is very relevant either, fwiw.

[hackable_sand]

Their comment is supremely relevant. The timing is not a coincidence and it tastes awful

[saagarjha]

You think this post was written because of the Discord stuff in the news?

[alterom]

>You think this post was written because of the Discord stuff in the news?

What a preposterously audacious proposition: to think that an article that describes Discord as a "a finely-tuned system that delivers speed, scale, and reliability" (that's a goddamn chat app, glorified IRC) and casts Discord in good light, written while Discord is experiencing a major scandal, might not be entirely unrelated to the scandal.

More so when the said article offers no concrete details about Discord, instead wildly extrapolating from a few quotes from executives, making assumptions, and talking about what could have been done, all in a way that might as well have been ChatGPT's output.

Yeah, we think that shifting the focus from "Discord stuff in the news" (which is: forcing ID verification and face scans while having connections to Peter Thiel's surveillance business), something that benefits both Discord and Thiel, is quite a likely reason for glowing technical articles about Discord taking off on HN all of a sudden.

[saagarjha]

I think it’s a low quality post but I’m not super convinced it really has anything to do with Discord’s ID verification thing, or even if it does, it seems really bad at doing this? Like I said before I think there is barely any content here and meanwhile everyone and their mother is discussing the policy they rolled out globally. At least on this site at least, it’s basically the most interesting news this week that isn’t AI.

[alterom]

>I don't really think your comment is very relevant either, fwiw.

Hmmm, really? Just mentioning the biggest thing in the news involving Discord right now isn't relevant to a post about Discord, huh?

What can I say, you have a peculiar definition of relevance.

[saagarjha]

Yes, because the post isn’t about Discord. Hacker News always devalues generic comments like those.

[alterom]

>Yes, because the post isn’t about Discord.

I love the mental gymnastics it takes to say that an article titled "Discord: A case study in performance optimization", which describes what Discord is, talks about Discord's architecture, and lauds it as "a finely-tuned system that delivers speed, scale, and reliability" isn't aKsHuAlLy about Discord.

>Hacker News always devalues generic comments like those

First: you are not Hacker News, please don't speak for others. Some people did find my comment relevant. They are just as much Hacker News as you are.

Second: my comment wasn't generic. It pointed out that the timing of this article is conspicuous given the news that, at the moment of writing that comment, were not discussed widely on HN.

Since then, someone has posted the exact link I mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021421

So, sorry, but reality disagrees with your assessment of it.

[saagarjha]

I understand your indignation but I assure you that this is an actual category of comment that is considered to be low quality on this site. It is so common and damaging that there are special tools to downweight them, because they stifle curious conversation by getting upvotes while providing little value. I didn’t design this policy, so I don’t really feel comfortable sharing the exact details of how it is applied, but if you are curious the moderators would probably be happy to do so. The very thing you think I am being absurd about is exactly the hallmark of these “generic” comments: they pattern match on some keyword or the title or the post and then pull the conversation away from the topic being discussed, which is specific, into an easier and more general discussion on something tangentially related but predictable. Here’s a lampoon of this which happens any time Apple appears in the headline for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23003595