“”"”The more recent readers don’t, or a critical mass of people is developing who don’t work to contribute substantive material. I hadn’t really thought about the issue until about a month ago, in this comment thread, where I pointed out that single-function devices can still have utility. “”"

You pointed it out, alright.

But:

besides the obvious observation that pointing out that “single-function devices can still have utility” is not “substantive” in itself (gee, we know it already, we use forks, knives, socks, pens, and a million other single-function devices everyday)

you also failed to notice that the topic of the thread (as set by the parent) was not the utility of single function devices, but the notion of “brainwidth”. Of which you said: “My brain is not a passive entity that is ‘being sucked up.’ People either let themselves be sucked up, or they don’t”.

And your proof of your brain NOT being “sucked up” was to …recite your use of every hipster cliche: the inevitable moleskine, the wrist watch, plus an iPhone. You even responded with point 3, regarding moleskine’s variable/declining quality, another hipster concern that lead to alternatives such as “Field Notes”, etc.

Is irony completely opaque to you?

“”" Dextorious has a lot of problems with reason; he tends to post things like “Thanks for the “democratic” downvoting.””"”

Yeah. I have tons of problems with reason. But you seem to have problems with proper identification of the relevance and purpose of a comment and/or comment thread.

For example, I didn’t argue that downvoting is undemocratic in itself and in general, I posted that in thread about how America is not cutting it as a model for democracy. Downvotes to that comment meant that “no it’s cutting it, and we’ll prove it by downvoting contrarian opinions”. See the irony this time?

Have you also missed the general discussion on HN about using downvotes to flag out off topic or bad argumentation, instead of using it to fade into oblivions opinions you don’t agree with? The second can be called undemocratic, in the way it violates the, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” principle.

Or, let’s take:

“”"”He calls Facebook “hyper-valued web crap,” but not in the context of providing real insight.”"”"

Over-valued crap is enough real insight about Facebook. You’ll thank me one day.

But you seemed to have missed the general idea, cutting my sentence in half. Why would you do that now, jseliger? Why?

My quote was: “As if this has worked well in the past for other hyper-valued web crap…”, ie suggesting we learned from the history of other hyper-inflated over-valuations. I even mentioned the flagship example of VA Linux, circa 1999.

“”"I looked through his comment history; there are many one-line, two-sentence comments like this one, which led to a pointless flame war. “”"

How offensive, my two sentence comment. You happened to miss that it was a reply to a one sentence comment, about how: “[Python] made the mistake of making whitespace significant thereby driving off people in droves”.

Which is more insightful,

1) that people avoided Python (a highly successful, widely used language with a huge community) because of whitespace,

or my comment that says that

2) that was a concern (and frequent “religious” issue) in the nineties, nobody really cares about that kind of thing re: python now?

“”"Others tell him that he’s not being very nice, as in a comment where Dinkumthinkum says, “You’re missing the point.” “”"

Someone told somebody else on the internet “you’re missing the point”. News at 11. And this somehow translates to “I’m not being very nice”?

Well, I might not be nice.

But I’m not a finger-pointing, cry-baby, stalking-idiot about it.

“Boo-hoo somebody pooh-poohed on one of my comments, I’m gonna search their comment history, present it out of context, call them names, and make them an example of a general trend in HN. That’ll show ‘em. Nobody messes with the Seligman!”