[ryandrake]

> When someone actually has built something, and it could be used by someone, they only get feedback about the size of the pages, how slow it is and that they should have used some other technology after all.

I know of a certain community where this seems to happen a lot. Instead of commenting on the actual content or the idea, it's always "Their web page doesn't SCROLL the way I like!!" and "What amateurs--they should have used Angular React Ember js with Docker!!" and "I didn't read any of the article but the title is CLICK BAIT!"

People are often quick to make the easy critique of something based on irrelevant surface characteristics.

[nikanj]

Messed up js scrolling often means I _can't_ read the actual content. I know WP8 isn't that common, but should I just quietly accept that yet another developer decided to "innovate" and wrote a super sexy scroller that crashes and burns on my browser?

[mrspeaker]

Not quietly, but perhaps just not loudly to everyone around you... an email to the author is a billion times better than another worthless HN comment about color contrast.

[Joeboy]

wrt marginal design choices like colour schemes I absolutely agree, HN people spend too much time bickering about them. But people who wilfully display static content in such a way that people can't see it should be publicly shamed, pour encourager les autres. It's been a solved problem since 1993.

[mwfunk]

Yes, in that forum that may very well be what that means, if the outcome is that everyone ends up bikeshedding about whatever it is that they want to complain about and derailing the entire discussion.

[drcode]

The thing is that we need lots of people to innovate in website design in many different ways if we want the content and technology of the web to get better.

If someone spends months working on a site to incorporate new technology, it's really frustrating if the main feedback is that it breaks scrolling in someone's esoteric preferred web browser.

[tomphoolery]

If the site works well on every device but Windows Phone, then maybe it's not the site that's the problem.

[sequence7]

Although I see your point (Windows Phone is not that popular) couldn't you say the same for any mainstream device? i.e. If the site works well on every device but Linux/iOS/Android it's not the site that's the problem.

[derpderpdarp]

> People are often quick to make the easy critique of something based on irrelevant surface characteristics.

It's not even surface characteristics, it's just the ability to make a comment, to be a participant rather than an observer.

People need their own identities validated, and that is hard to do in a social world of opinions and ideas that is constantly shifting - you can look up information that validates your thoughts and chances are, you can just as easily find information that invalidates those thoughts, and this is eternal and unchanging.

The characteristics of truth seeking on the internet is chaos. There is so much under the surface stuff that goes into fueling ideas and shaping them. If a funny meme can explode in popularity over the internet, why can't an opinion that has no foundation in the facts, but instead it just 'clicks' correctly with a set of minds? It is nonsensical, but yet, it makes sense.

I don't know if it is genuinely easier to criticize something than it is to make a positive or neutral comment. I am interested in whether it is possible to have intelligent and polite discussion last for longer than what seems to be seconds at a time, in public, anonymous forums.

I do know that I have been thinking about developing an intellect that is okay with being confused for extended periods of time, just because it's something that I haven't tried to do in all my years of internet communication and various other kinds of education. I don't know what would happen to the shape of technology, of coding, of ideas, of analysis, if many people at once, gave themselves the chance to breathe, instead of having to constantly digest (or verify against their own) a selected path in a realm of chaotic, loosely connected, incomparable, inconstrastable, unsortable, etc, ideas. I just feel like this constant reaction to preference makes us feel like we are in control, when it's more that our individual control begins to control us.

The shape of reasoning for technology in the contemporary age looks more like that which is irrational and disorderly.

/shrug

[gfodor]

It's just bikeshedding bullshit. I just downvote and move on.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

One time an HN headline took me to an article written on pastebin; the HN comments were not full of UI complaints.

[drcode]

Yeah, I while ago I built what I thought was a site with really neat content (I thought) but 50% of the comments were about scrolling behavior. WTF HN?

[plorkyeran]

The quality of your content is irrelevant if your website doesn't work at all or annoys me into closing it before I've read any significant amount of it. Should I not complain about the scrolling when I literally can't read past the first two paragraphs because every time I try to scroll down it instead switches to some other article or does nothing at all? It's like having a book where the pages are all glued together and then complaining that people only talk about the glue.

[J_Darnley]

Don't screw over your content with design. Look at this place, Hacker News. Text, lots of it, all of which is perfectly readable without pagination, a fancy javscript scroller, or even images.