>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

This is the guideline that people find, by far, the hardest not to break. @dang or whoever - has anyone ever considered adding some kind of 'meta' discussion area to each topic? This would provide a place for people to commiserate / troubleshoot without diluting the main discussion? As we saw here, the discussions can sometimes be plenty productive (e.g. the author seeing and reacting to the criticism, paywall workarounds, etc.), it's just not what people interested in the actual subject want to read. And conversely, if it was moved into a special meta annex, people with a problem or a gripe would know right where to look.

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chrismorgan a day ago | parent | next [-]

The only reason I commented this was because the specific breakage was novel. And it’s rare for this specific type of comment to rank highly. Apparently this one is unusually interesting to others, or something? Beats me.

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sebastos 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, the specifics of this issue are intriguing on their own terms to the website nerds, but “there exists a problem with display of the website” surely rates as a tangential annoyance.

It’s unrealistic to imagine that we could ever fully moderate these meta comments away because there’s always going to be new problems and corresponding urges to discuss them. Nor do I think we really want to, when it comes down to it. They’re often useful, or at least cathartic.

…but. They DO make for dreadful reading if you actually came to read about the article itself. Thus my idea to add a wiki-style meta section. Then you get best of both worlds.

	▲	chrismorgan 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fortunately it’s easy to collapse the tree. And the mods do often override trees like this to default to collapsed.

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bbor 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you deserve a rule bending or two every once in a while, as a fine HN citizen in good standing. They're not even linked prominently, so the fact that they even exist for a site that doesn't justify moderation actions feels a bit like Eternal September Keyfabe