This doesn't have anything directly to do with the specific topic, which is the culture of whales. Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents.
On HN we're interested in the diffs [1]: what's specifically interesting about an article. Generic tangents pull threads away from that into the gravitational field of the nearest large topic, sort of like a spaceship flying too close to a black hole [2]. The generic topics are larger, more familiar, and more repetitive [3]. Familiarity is seductive, but repetition is bad for curiosity [4], and curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for [5]. The generic themes are usually more sensational and inflammatory, too, which is doubly not what we're looking for.
It's super tempting for threads to hop to the most-generic adjacent orbit. Often they make several such hops. By the time a discussion reaches "People are cruel", that's a good example of a black hole. No light is going to come out of such a thread.
p.s. Not saying the generic topics aren't important in society at large. They're usually much more important than most of what's on topic here. But a site like HN needs to stick to what it's for.
On HN we're interested in the diffs [1]: what's specifically interesting about an article. Generic tangents pull threads away from that into the gravitational field of the nearest large topic, sort of like a spaceship flying too close to a black hole [2]. The generic topics are larger, more familiar, and more repetitive [3]. Familiarity is seductive, but repetition is bad for curiosity [4], and curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for [5]. The generic themes are usually more sensational and inflammatory, too, which is doubly not what we're looking for.
It's super tempting for threads to hop to the most-generic adjacent orbit. Often they make several such hops. By the time a discussion reaches "People are cruel", that's a good example of a black hole. No light is going to come out of such a thread.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
p.s. Not saying the generic topics aren't important in society at large. They're usually much more important than most of what's on topic here. But a site like HN needs to stick to what it's for.