Because he's a true believer in the Long Now religion. But not enough of a true believer that he uses six or seven digits ;-)
Also, he uses that (and no capital letters) as a "bozo filter" - anyone who replies about that rather than the substance of the comment, he defines as someone he doesn't want to talk to anyway.
Personally, I think it's rather an obnoxious move. He's deliberately derailing discussion about the content, and he has decent content. But he insists on playing this game instead of just talking about the substance.
it's a little bit like wearing a mohawk or a short skirt. a certain kind of people reveal what kind of people they are by harassing the mohawk-wearer and blaming the target for it. nobody is going to read this thread and be dumb enough to say, 'oh, yes, clearly, the person who was derailing discussion about the patent status of h.264 and the future of video codecs, in order to advocate the far more important topic of proper capitalization, was someone other than animalmuppet'
(i recommend you knock it off)
but yeah, the main benefit is that it gets people to read about the long now foundation
1. Fine. You didn't derail the discussion; you just deliberately opened a tempting door for it to be derailed. As a "bozo filter". Is that better?
2. The person who derailed the conversation was 293984j29384.
3. It's AnimalMuppet, not animalmuppet.
4. Why do I care? I think about that scene in Chariots Of Fire where the track coach is talking to a sprinter, and explaining that is starting steps are too far apart. As he explains what it's like, he says "It knocks you back" and slaps him lightly in the face. The runner rocks back slightly. "Knocks you back" and slaps him lightly. He does this four times. Then he says, "You see?"
That's what you're doing to your readers with your dates and your lack of proper capitalization. Sure, they can read it. But it costs them a small amount of unnecessary effort to parse it. Does it matter? As the track coach said, "I can get you another two yards." Two yards isn't much, in a 100 yard race, but it's enough to matter. (And posts are read more often than they are written. It's a small matter for each reader, but if 10 people read it, or 100, it adds up.)
Look, if you want to do that in a blog, that's fine. You do you. I won't care. But I care about HN, and I care about you making it a worse experience for people. I wish you would stop doing so.
293984j29384 asked a perfectly reasonable question; they are blameless. you're the one who chose to start heckling the people who are actually talking about interesting things, attempting to harass them into formatting their comments more to your personal liking. that's what makes hn a worse experience for people
and if you think you're enforcing some kind of community standards by doing so, i have bad news for you
