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by kyro 4878 days ago
This is a really dismissive comment that could be used to trivialize just about any article and debate here on HN. While it isn't a big issue, this topic is something designer's do think about and a discussion about its effects on user experience seems reasonable. Plus I doubt anyone's losing hours of productivity over this.
3 comments

I disagree, I think if the OP was attempting to make a fair analysis, he should have acknowledged the third option. My immediate thought was the same expressed in this comment, as My & Your add wordiness. I suppose it depends on the overall tone & genre of the software you're (I'm?) designing, but it's an obvious alternative.
Dustin's post was not simply about whether to prepend labels with "my" or "your". That choice was an example of a more fundamental concern: whether to imagine the user as seeing an app as an extension of themselves or as seeing the app as a separate entity, and the implications of that in the interface.

It may have been helpful for the post to consider the effects of using no pronouns on a user's mental model, and a better response to the post would be to explore those effects, not to dismiss it outright as a false dilemma. A much better method of dismissing posts that have obvious answers is to not comment on them.

Calling comments dismissive is rather dismissive in itself. I don't see what is wrong with pointing out a better option (in the opinion of the commentator) in a succinct way.
>This is a really dismissive comment that could be used to trivialize just about any article and debate here on HN.

Well, thinking in a false binary, when there are far more choices, as the article does, already trivialises the subject matter.