It's just frustrating that knee-jerk reactions are ubiquitous in the Hacker News comments, on every popular submission, despite the site guidelines urging the opposite.
In my case, this forum is habit forming to engage in the comment section. If a post has enough comments, to me it signals it's an interesting topic, never mind if I don't know anything about the subject matter, there might be very smart folks sharing knowledge. Comments can veer wildly off the original topic and I find that also appealing. This is "unfair" to the submitted post, of course, but ... HN is still here.
I'm not complaining about tangents, though, but rather about dismissive insults. A tangent is a conversation starter, whereas a knee-jerk dismissal is a conversation stopper.
It's just frustrating that knee-jerk reactions are ubiquitous in the Hacker News comments, on every popular submission, despite the site guidelines urging the opposite.