What do you think parent is trying to say, except that this HN comment section looks like reddit? I'm trying my hardest to apply charitable reading, but even this has limits.
My understanding as well, as if Reddit was down and redditors took to HN to distill their anger. It's not calling a specific comment like this, it's calling most of comments here like this.
Perhaps about the quality of the comments. In my opinion it's not really that bad but reddit-style comments are often cheap shots that are slightly off topic, some of which I see present here
There are many differences IMO. Moderators, for instance, censor a ton on reddit; but the UI is also different. I much preferred old.reddit.com over both the new reddit (which is utter trash) and hackernews (which is simple, but also ... strange and awkward, much more confusing than old.reddit.com - and I hate the fact that after like 5 comments, I get locked out for hours before I can make more comments, that is the worst decision hackernews ever made).
I don't think length intrinsically denotes quality. One could say that longer sentences show more quality, but I would not even be certain of that either.
The biggest difference I noticed has been between smartphone/tablet users on the one hand, and oldschool desktop computer system users. I belong to the latter group and I think we, as a group, write more, and faster. I'd also like to assume it has a higher quality, but I am not automatically convinced of that either.
Always thought this rule is hilarious because the fact that such comparisons are so overwhelmingly common that they needed to address it with this bitchy little rule (adding one link to an example per word is a classic tell that an internet moderator is spending their highly compensated moderation time Extremely Mad lol).
However, rather than understand the obvious explanation for it, that reddit and HN's karma systems encourage performative comment behavior with people trying to be epic for the peanut gallery, they make the boneheaded decision to just assume it's an "illusion". It's like Dunning-Krueger but for their theory of mind and general emotional intelligence, with the cause being obvious enough that I don't feel I need to name it.
I suspect it'll only become more common as Reddit enshittifies further and further. The platform is basically unusable for anyone, thus its suitability as a 'containment zone' for the redditor phenotype goes down with it.
I hope BlueSky makes a Lemmy-style Reddit alternative, just something to satiate people's social media-ified forum fix.
