How is this at the top of HN? Apparently people that need this stuff sit on HN and vote it up. If you don't want to go to these sites I have some advice: Don't go to them.
Commenting online becomes addictive. It becomes a horrible time sink and a useless waste of time. Either arguing with people who don't understand anything, or endlessly circle-jerking with people who have the same viewpoint as you. Some even fall into the trap of believing their "karma" score somehow means something. All it means is how much time you waste online commenting.
Once you start commenting online, you can't easily stop. So it's not as simple as "Don't go to them".
Not to mention all the fringe benefits a decent karma score can bring you ... well not really the karma score itself, but the activities you do to get said score. It's really just putting "How useful you are to the community" into a cold hard integer.
Being useful/known/etc. in the right communities has been a pretty damn important thing since forever.
As always, what matters is what you do with all of this. Just having it by itself doesn't mean a thing.
It's strange how often comments like these crop up on various topics, because they're difficult to understand. The core of your argument is "I don't have this problem, so therefore no-one does". I mean, you are aware at at some base level that people are different right? They have different thoughts, weaknesses and so on.
If tools like this can help, then that can be nothing but a good thing, I don't think there is any need to be derisive about it.
And I suppose then that you are one of those people who believe that advertising does not work on them because they have made up their mind not to be affected by it?
