As much as I don't like meta comments I'm going to have to make one finally, because I think about it every day and just need to get it out there to at least relieve the pressure in my head.
Why is the top voted comment so often about the title of the story? I guess it's because it's the first thing we interact with and it frames our expectations, but man alive, the title is probably the least interesting thing about any article posted to HN but consistently I see top rated comments talking about the title. Maybe it's just lowest-common-denominator.
And it's not that I think the comments themselves are bad, it's just weird to me that I consistently see them at the top of the page.
Apologies for the meta rant, it won't happen again, at least from me. (In fact the reason we have a lot of meta comments might be the same as the reason we have a lot of title-comments making me a bit hypocritical, but I digress.)
I think it's because people upvote most often when they share a particular opinion -- and your first opinion is mostly about the title of the article.
For example. I saw the title, clicked through (also opened comments), gave the page a once-over (didn't even read) -- came back here, and saw that first post. I also agree with the guy said, I thought they came up with some amazing new way to view regular diffs in 3D. So, I would have upvoted. Maybe it's just me, but I'm guessing far more people do that
In this case, possibly because it may provide some value to anyone reading the comments before the article. I too through it was going to be a diff for text files using a different visualization, not a diff of a specific file type. In that respect, it's a clarification of whatever summary you might infer from the title.
In short, I found the comment useful, it not necessarily inspiring of conversation (although a discussion of different visualizations of changes may be worthwhile).
I've thought about this before and attributed it simply to bikeshedding. When something interesting pops up people really want to be part of the conversation but don't have the background to talk about the main topic so they comment about the meta information.
Same here, perhaps "GitHub announces Diffs for 3D Files" would be clearer. This is a really awesome feature though, I'd be curious to see what other types of files they do this for (if any).
Now I think about it, it's super cool that GitHub are putting so much effort into being a useful platform for file formats traditionally not associated (much) with software development.
There is so much cool stuff you could investigate over and above text files: understanding photoshop files and describing layer changes; diffing audio and identifying mixes and how they were mixed.
A always assumed it was fake until a few years later a friend brought an SGI workstation into work to play with, and showed me the file manager.
Now I generally try to keep an open mind when I see things in movies as elements, while they may not be entirely correct, are sometimes based on reality. It just happens to be a portion of reality you are unfamiliar with.
I was thinking the same thing and was wondering how exactly that would look like as the page loaded. In a way I was disappointed. It's still a pretty cool feature though.
Me too. But as I was clicking and lagging on getting to the page, I was trying to visualize what a 3D view of a file diff would look like. I can't even imagine it.
