the whole vtuber thing is not really for me, but i appreciate the effort that went into this presentation—did you make it all the way to <https://asahilina.net/agx-exploit/#/demoslide>?
"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."
Respectfully: do you genuinely believe that guideline had this kind of presentation in mind, or the very common tedium of poorly built websites that occurs frequently on amateur tech posts. Even the examples provided by the rule you quoted lend to the latter.
The guideline is to prevent threads turning discussions of interesting things into discussions of boring things, like most of the other guidelines. Plus you can ask the person who came up with it, I'm sure they'll tell you something similar.
Ah, a question I can answer unambiguously! - since I wrote that guideline, I can tell you what was/is in my mind.
Internet threads have a tendency to get stuck on annoyances that aren't pertinent to the actual topic. It's a bit like a branch getting snagged at the edge of a creek: all sorts of detritus accumulates around the branch, clogging the flow. This isn't just about comments—arguably a bigger problem is that upvotes, since such subthreads invariably attract a lot of those.
On HN, we don't have any rule against going off topic per se, because offtopic tangents can sometimes be fun and interesting—usually when they're unpredictable, i.e. when they're about something specific that doesn't get talked about much, or maybe has never been talked about.
But threads about presentation errors, usability errors, and so on, are highly predictable because they happen a lot, and also because they're annoying and people tend to express annoyance in the same ways over and over. This becomes repetitive and repetition is the enemy of curiosity [1], so it follows from HN's primary principle [2] that we should try to avoid them.
One thing to understand about that guideline is that it's not denying the correctness of the annoyance! Of course you're right that formatting, presentation, usability, design, etc., are important. The issue is that discussions tend to get clogged by comments about these things, precisely because they are annoying. I'm as annoyed by them as anyone and I think most of us are.
Our challenge as a community is to experience those annoyances and process them however we process them but not to complain about them in the comments—rather to stay on topic (or at least on something unpredictable), not because crappy websites etc. deserve better, but because we want to prioritize interesting conversations about interesting things to read.
(I should add that when I say "crappy websites" I'm not talking about the OP - I only spent a couple seconds looking at it and didn't personally experience annoyance. I just mean we all have our triggers and they work more or less the same way in everyone.)
There are times when website styling and design really go beyond the pale, and this is one of those cases.
The content may be excellent. The packaging utterly frustrates accessing that, and flouts all standard conventions of design. The author took a risk. The author lost.
2. The communication requires numerous unnecessary click throughs to obtain the relevant information.
3. The division of the information into various panels and mediums does not enhance the communication, rather the messages are divided in a way that doesn't match a hierarchal introduction of detail. It often serves no purpose whatsoever.
Also this is not some personal attack on identity "who she wants to be", it's a commentary on poor communication - don't attempt to equate the two, it's incredibly poor taste, and flame baiting.
