By your logic, any time someone posts about GitHub, it’s appropriate and sensible for each of us to post about whatever GitHub bug upsets us most. This leads to the HN we have today, with hundreds of upvoted comments per day clamoring about each individual’s personal upsets, wholly unrelated to the topics at hand.

If you had violated a guideline, I would have contacted the mods rather than reply. The tragedy is that no rule can sufficiently be written that keeps people from concern shopping their personal issues into discussions on the most tenuous of links. “This is a post about a GitHub bug” opens the door for me to post about the hundreds of GitHub bugs I’ve encountered over time, and with thousands of users at HN, if we each do this, there’s so much less room left for discussion about the actual bug this post is about.

This affects Show HN, too: when someone posts their cool thing, everyone chimes in with all the other cool things that they like better. It’s incredibly disheartening and sets aside the purpose of the post – “a thing, discuss” – so that people can use that request as a launchpad to discuss other things instead, without making even the slightest effort to tie it back with relative comparisons to the Show HN topic itself.

There is no guideline that asks us to set aside our personal needs and desires in these comments and focus on what brings the most value to the original topic, no matter what we feel about other topics that happen to also be about GitHub. But I continue to hope, out loud and with salient arguments, that HN will step up and respect itself more than the guidelines require.