The article criticizes that too many comments are about related context and not strictly about the article. In my opinion, that's very valuable because I could have read the article by myself without HN. But I only get shown other people's associations through the HN comments. So them being slightly off-topic widens my horizon of knowledge.
This is 100% why I often read the comments -- possibly without reading the article. The article might be talking about something I already know or might have even read already. But the comments often just veers off and I learn about something new but slightly related. For me comments is about discovery and exploration with the original topic as a starting point.
Absolutely. Comments are sometimes critical around here and could maybe arrive softer but this is one of the few remaining spots on the internet to read largely civilized, high-value discourse on a topic and related context.
Increasingly, I won't even read the article itself, but the comments, because the topic is one of interest and I want to soak in the adjacent commentary and percolate some new thoughts before doing my own reading on a subject.
Sometimes I start with the comments then go back and read the article pre-conditioned by the commentary. It usually enriches my experience.
This is not a good thing but I read HN comments as a way to outsource my critical thinking. The author of a blog post or article is speaking from a single perspective and set of biases. Reading through the comments gives me a sampling of thinking that comes from different perspectives and biases.
HN isn't intended to be your blog's commenting system though. If you want a dialogue between the author and their audience, have the discussion at the source. HN is for HN'ers. And as a fellow commenter noted, quite a few people (myself included) frequently just use the article title (or maybe a small quote from the article) as a "writing prompt". And there's nothing wrong with that unless your expectations are out of whack in the first place.
And probably half of the time an HN comment leads to a discussion that is tangential to the original topic, and that thread becomes the most active sub-thread of the discussion. And I would argue, again, that that is totally fine. Nothing is written mandating that all (or even any) of the discussion on an HN link be pertinent to the point that the author of TFA was trying to make. It's nice when it is, but as long as the ensuing discussion is interesting, then it's useful to the people who are participating. For people who don't like that, then yeah sure, you're free to choose not to read HN comments. shrug
I think the "title as a writing prompt" approach can be frustrating in some cases, as an HN participant. Essentially every article about general interest SWE topics (remote work, job interviews, etc.) gets dominated by the exact same viewpoint and complaints, no matter how specific the focus of the original article.
Paraphrasing: "No one appreciates the hard work that went into my medium blog, which I hope to monetize at some point, and to top it off, anonymous people leave mean comments"
Are you new to the internet?
(the author doesn't read comments so I'm in no danger of offending him)
Yeah, exactly how I felt. They say, “we all know writing a blog is hard, it can take at least an hour”
The quality of blogs varies wildly so this makes no sense. Gwern seems to take a long time to write their blog and do research. Sometimes a blog post is literally a teenagers stream of consciousness. Both are OK, but it really depends on the blog whether I consider writing it both 1) a lot of work 2) valuable to me.
I just found this tone offputting. It was peak wordcell behavior IMO.
The argument here (which I may have misunderstood, but take to be essentially that articles are likely to be of a higher quality because they're harder to produce than HN comments) makes sense, but it turns out not to be true in practice (at least from my experience on HN, which is mostly limited to certain technical topics).
I understand where the author is coming from, but the fact is (unfortunately) that the quality of HN comments is typically better than the quality of online articles, blog posts etc.
I think it's a combination of the fact that there are a lot of smart, accomplished people on HN, and also the overall low quality of what's found elsewhere on the internet. Most of what's out there is just pants, but even when it's good, a discussion with smart people is almost always more interesting, and I honestly doubt that it stops me from reading worthwhile stuff. You can generally tell when the person commenting has read the article, and you can usually make a good guess at what the basis of their opinion is.
Yeah; if anything this article is a good argument to stop writing comments, not stop reading them. However, the time commitment for that is high, and the most insightful folks tend to have day jobs.
Not sure why the author is complaining. Commenting on a blog and writing a blog have never been confused. No one has ever compared commenting to writing a blog.
Commenting has it's own place. If you don't like the comments, maybe you shouldn't post on HN. I don't know how ignorant you have to be to literally pass by the very purpose of a site like HN. It's literally built to hold discussions. Commenting is the _only_ thing you do here. There's no chat, no fancy reactions, no groups, no "pages", nothing. Just an input box and a button to express your opinion.
The UX could be better but that's an excuse for the lazy. You don't want to scroll? That's on you, not the website. You wrote a very long blog and I can't scroll past the first paragraph. Is the fault yours or mine?
With that said, not every link gets 3000 comments. The example given is an exception. Most of the time the comments stick to the point with a lot of constructive opinions in them. You can't silence the crowd, you can't control the crowd, and you certainly can't own the crowd. So just let the crowd be. If you don't like that, refrain from posting stuff here.
> The result is a …dialog—not between a commenter and people who replied to his comment—but between different commenters who steal the focus of the discussion to their own opinion.
I struggle to see what’s wrong with that. If I watch a movie with a friend, should our post-viewing discussion be restricted to certain subjects? The wide ranging discussions in the comments can be irrelevant to me or quite fascinating and more relevant to me. The original article deserves no priority either way.
Also, the author talks about the effort of selecting photos. I’m glad they footnote. But please, if you want me to read your article don’t go to this effort. If there’s a photo it should be germane and often easy to to get, like the picture of the HN front page. But an orange box with the HN logo and an inkblot, or the embedded video with some rando talking? That crap is just visual junk that interferes with reading and gives me at least the impression that the author isn’t serious. I understand Medium requires a junk photo or more and it’s one reason I rarely bother to follow a link to a Medium post.
BTW this comment took longer than ten seconds to write.
"You can read an article written by someone who went through the difficulties I mentioned earlier and spent quite some time creating a content that he found important enough, or you can read the comments made by several other people who took like 10 seconds to write something"
Can't I do both? I'm pretty sure I can, because that's what I do.
"You can read an article that is at least somewhat cohesive and informative, or you can read countless opinions that often do not add anything to your knowledge."
Again, I'm pretty sure I can do both. And opinions in comments often do add something valuable. That's why I continue to read them.
"You can choose to read a piece of article that took 1 hour to write by one person, or read the comments made by 360 people who took 10 seconds to write their opinion about the article. In the end, you end up consuming the same 3600 man-seconds. The difference is that the article author went through the steps I mentioned earlier to give a better experience about his content, and the commenters did not."
Three different paragraphs all to say the same thing. The article should be more useful, so you should read that instead of the comments, which are almost certainly not useful.
I guess my experience is not at all similar. Most of the time I find the comments more useful than the article. The article in question is no exception. The entire thing can be summarized in one "ten second" comment with nothing useful added by reading the full article.
Here's the thing - 360 comments is not written by 360 people. 360 comments is written by 36,000 readers only 1% of whom decide to comment.
It's not the time it takes to write the comment, it's the time it takes to accumulate the knowledge. With the comments you are consuming way more than 3600 man-seconds. I'll take the comments most of the time.
I am largely in agreement with this. I have a love/hate relationship with HN comments because of the "yeah, BUT..." flow of so much of the dialogue. The "misappropriation of context" funnel lens on display feels more intense here than on other platforms.
I still get a lot of value from HN, but possibly more from the submissions than the comments. Sometimes there's gold in the comments, but it's questionable if the signal/noise ratio, and the time to dig for it, is worth the effort.
That's how discussions are. They move from thing to thing which is what makes them so interesting. If HN always stayed focused strictly on a single topic, you'd only find replies like "yes, I agree."
The fact that people come out and take time to share their own experience is very valuable. There are not many places like HN. Most of the rest of the internet is filled with trolls, maybe that's what people prefer?
I don't get your signal/noise ratio statement. Comments are not only for you. They aren't a blog post. They are opinions, thoughts, experiences, of a lot of people. You can't apply such a thing as signal/noise because what to you seems as noise might be very valuable for someone else.
That is a good point about the misappropriation of context. To often, the discussion consists of people misunderstanding each other or responding to minor points rather than the main point of the parent comment.
Plus any reply that's not the top reply is not shown adjacent to the comment it's replying to, which can make the discussion hard to follow. (Not sure there's a solution to this since we read linearly but a group discussion like this does not have a linear structure.)
I still read and enjoy the comments but it's a "choppy" experience in terms of context and that can leave me feeling dissatisfied when ideas don't have a chance to develop or really go somewhere.
Yeah, blog posts take more effort than comments but they also tend to have more of a payoff for the writer. So there can be more ulterior motives at play in terms of trying to sell something or get attention.
The fact that someone has put more effort into a blog post doesn't necessarily translate into more value for me, the reader.
One article sparked a lively discussion on the security of python -m when the author advocated its use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156581 (this one was just their submission, not their story)
I'm not sure what comments the author is talking about that are "hateful". People on HN can be a bit "difficult" at times, especially if perspectives or experiences diverge significantly. In general, I'll give this advice: When I post, I read the comments but don't engage. Engaging is unhealthy for me and it detracts from the current state of what I wrote (I am the kind of person that will go change my blog posts over time). For others the rule is "Don't read the comments". Personally, I think the author falls in the latter category - and that's not to say anything bad of it, it's just the way some folks are.
I stopped reading this blog post well before the end. Guy writes blog. Blog gets comments on HN. Guy thinks there are too many comments on HN. So what? HN is not his blog, and has no obligation to be what he wants it to be. If he wants to manage the comments, he can implement comments on his own blog and do that.
It's an interesting phenomenon for HN in particular. The quality of comments tends to be higher than other platforms, so I feel more comfortable (and more fulfilled) reading the experiences and opinions of those who do so.
I imagine a meatspace analogue where a presenter works for a period of time on a slide deck and a presentation, only for most people who come to stand in the back and chatter - or at best, for many people after the presentation, to be discussing things entirely beside the point you made. "Why are they caring more about their own chat instead of my insights?"
I get it, but that's the rub. And as someone said, HN strictly speaking has no obligation to be any site's commenting system. Install and manage your own, use a 3P tool, or even manage your own personal subreddit if you feel like it.
---
Off-topic, regarding HN comments: I believe Slashdot to this day has the most useful and effective balance of "free speech" and of quality control of any forum on the Internet. It doesn't require oligarchic mods to filter out undesirable or rash comments; the community does it just fine. Rationale for the comment's value is put in a few buckets such as funny, troll, low effor, insightful, and so on.
Having a metamod system, reducing the number of dead/shadowban comments, and a few minor UI tweaks would be amazing for this site IMO.
I agree with your point on Slashdot's moderation. In the 25 (ow) or so years I've been reading Slashdot it's been very rare to see genuinely bad comments remain at a 4 or 5 or genuinely good comments buried at -1. The semi random distribution of mod points and meta moderation have been highly effective.
Slashdot didn't really ever fall prey to the sort of manipulation that destroyed Digg or has made Reddit's major subreddits a cesspool. HN seems to skirt by on being slightly more niche and dang's tireless moderation efforts.
The minus button makes it really easy to sift through comments. Much easier than finding the interesting paragraphs in an article actually. A blog post might have required some deep thought, as the author says not as much as a book, but probably more than went into a comment. But it's deep thought that went into a single idea, by a single person, in a single circumstance. Deep thought can only go so far.
When you're using the minus button you'll go through all sorts of thoughts and responses. Sure, if you're easily offended by dumb reactionary comments, then you'll often find a couple at the top. That might hurt your ego, but if you just let it go, hit downvote, and then the minus button, it can be out of sight out of mind in an instant. You'll get to the good parts of the comments soon enough. Those comments might not have been worked on for hours or days or weeks, but the authors might have deep knowledge regardless. And if not deep knowledge, different perspectives stemming from different backgrounds, circumstances and personalities.
I usually read the comments first, and depending on the topic and how engaging the comments are to the topic I might read the article. In the example post of the news of Elon's bid on Twitter, no way that I'll read the article, no way that Bloomberg put any deep thought in their article, and guaranteed that there's people on HN with way more interesting perspectives than that can be stamped out in the couple minutes an overworked tech journalist has to make sure their article attains maximum reach.
This comment took more than 10 seconds to write, and many comments on HN did. I'd just as much enjoy 36 hundred second comments, as I would a one hour article.
Honestly I love to see something I worked on or wrote and then read the top 3-5 upvoted comments on HN. They help me do better the next time. I usually focus on objective critique and not cynicism.
Top-rated comments can be hit or miss though. Toxic snark under the guise of "wit" can still get upvoted (even when the community rules specifically discourage it).
> Moreover, HN does not notify users about replies to their comments, so it is your duty to always check your own comments to see if there is any activity there.
Public service announcement: you can sign up to HN Replies (created by dang) to get an email notifications whenever someone replies to one of your HN comments. I only found out about this recently and I really like it!
As a blogger whose articles occasionally become popular on HN, my main complaint is that HN commenters don't apply the same guidelines to article authors that they do to each other. There's a double standard. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Of course HN commenters don't always follow the guidelines with each other either, but it's at least an aspiration, and the moderators will step in if there are major violations. But there seems to be no such protection for article authors.
I've found that the best way to keep HN commenters from becoming too dismissive and/or vicious is to step in and reply myself to comments on my articles. It shouldn't have to be that way, but that's the way it is now.
We definitely try to moderate the same way. For example personal attacks on authors are no more ok than personal attacks on fellow commenters; shallow dismissals of other people's work are not ok (regardless of whose work it is), and so on.
The limit on this is just that (many) people don't follow the guidelines in either case, no matter how often we repeat them.
I do think you're right that there's an tendency to be harsher on authors, though—because it feels like they're not "in the room". It's like gossip: we're all looser-lipped when someone's not around. That would explain your observation that the comments change once you show up as a commenter in the thread about your article. Gossip mutes itself when the person being gossiped about walks in.
The trouble, of course, is that on the internet this is an illusion. The author is "in the room", or soon will be after they track the referring URL of all the traffic. Then they show up and get to hear all the things people were saying when they "weren't there".
HN Comments are kinda like Twitter. They have all of the same attributes:
- every now and then there is a fantastic tweet
- many of them are bad
- there's a lot of them, more than you could ever read
- they are all consistent: you're used to the format, the rules are simple to understand
- there are some ads and some ulterior motives, but for the most part, it's just normal people posting
Of course they aren't special! This article is kind of a "category error." No dig at the author with this, seriously. I genuinely think it's a good post, worth sharing (that's why I'm commenting here!). BUT, this article is kind of like:
Why I don't expect my dog to cook me breakfast any more
Breakfast is great. It fills you up, it tastes good, and after you've been sleeping a while you get pretty hungry, a problem that breakfast solves handily. Occasionally, I have had breakfast cooked for me; it is wonderful!
But I have noticed that my dog never cooks me breakfast. This is because it's a dog. It could be because it doesn't share the same love for breakfast that I have. It could be that it does not have opposable thumbs, or perhaps the lack of prefrontal cortex development. Either way, I've noticed that my dog has never ever cooked me breakfast.
For this reason, I've stopped expecting my dog to cook me breakfast. It seems like every time I expect this to happen, it doesn't happen.
---
What I have noticed about HN comments is that HN commenters are usually very intelligent people, and they usually comment "for fun." This is in contrast to nearly everywhere else on the internet, where people are either not very bright (so their comments aren't very clever or even fun to read) AND/OR posting comments or articles with the motive to make money. By volume, I'd say most stuff on the internet does not exist "for fun" but rather because it is self-promotional for some reason.
[+] [-] fxtentacle|3 years ago|reply
The article criticizes that too many comments are about related context and not strictly about the article. In my opinion, that's very valuable because I could have read the article by myself without HN. But I only get shown other people's associations through the HN comments. So them being slightly off-topic widens my horizon of knowledge.
[+] [-] hangonhn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepfriedbits|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schmookeeg|3 years ago|reply
Sometimes I start with the comments then go back and read the article pre-conditioned by the commentary. It usually enriches my experience.
[+] [-] PebblesRox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|3 years ago|reply
And probably half of the time an HN comment leads to a discussion that is tangential to the original topic, and that thread becomes the most active sub-thread of the discussion. And I would argue, again, that that is totally fine. Nothing is written mandating that all (or even any) of the discussion on an HN link be pertinent to the point that the author of TFA was trying to make. It's nice when it is, but as long as the ensuing discussion is interesting, then it's useful to the people who are participating. For people who don't like that, then yeah sure, you're free to choose not to read HN comments. shrug
[+] [-] itsdrewmiller|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user249|3 years ago|reply
Are you new to the internet?
(the author doesn't read comments so I'm in no danger of offending him)
[+] [-] wand3r|3 years ago|reply
The quality of blogs varies wildly so this makes no sense. Gwern seems to take a long time to write their blog and do research. Sometimes a blog post is literally a teenagers stream of consciousness. Both are OK, but it really depends on the blog whether I consider writing it both 1) a lot of work 2) valuable to me.
I just found this tone offputting. It was peak wordcell behavior IMO.
[+] [-] injb|3 years ago|reply
I understand where the author is coming from, but the fact is (unfortunately) that the quality of HN comments is typically better than the quality of online articles, blog posts etc.
I think it's a combination of the fact that there are a lot of smart, accomplished people on HN, and also the overall low quality of what's found elsewhere on the internet. Most of what's out there is just pants, but even when it's good, a discussion with smart people is almost always more interesting, and I honestly doubt that it stops me from reading worthwhile stuff. You can generally tell when the person commenting has read the article, and you can usually make a good guess at what the basis of their opinion is.
[+] [-] hedora|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gtex555|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] longrod|3 years ago|reply
Commenting has it's own place. If you don't like the comments, maybe you shouldn't post on HN. I don't know how ignorant you have to be to literally pass by the very purpose of a site like HN. It's literally built to hold discussions. Commenting is the _only_ thing you do here. There's no chat, no fancy reactions, no groups, no "pages", nothing. Just an input box and a button to express your opinion.
The UX could be better but that's an excuse for the lazy. You don't want to scroll? That's on you, not the website. You wrote a very long blog and I can't scroll past the first paragraph. Is the fault yours or mine?
With that said, not every link gets 3000 comments. The example given is an exception. Most of the time the comments stick to the point with a lot of constructive opinions in them. You can't silence the crowd, you can't control the crowd, and you certainly can't own the crowd. So just let the crowd be. If you don't like that, refrain from posting stuff here.
[+] [-] lapcat|3 years ago|reply
Anyone can submit a blog post to HN, not just the blog author.
[+] [-] NonNefarious|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gumby|3 years ago|reply
I struggle to see what’s wrong with that. If I watch a movie with a friend, should our post-viewing discussion be restricted to certain subjects? The wide ranging discussions in the comments can be irrelevant to me or quite fascinating and more relevant to me. The original article deserves no priority either way.
Also, the author talks about the effort of selecting photos. I’m glad they footnote. But please, if you want me to read your article don’t go to this effort. If there’s a photo it should be germane and often easy to to get, like the picture of the HN front page. But an orange box with the HN logo and an inkblot, or the embedded video with some rando talking? That crap is just visual junk that interferes with reading and gives me at least the impression that the author isn’t serious. I understand Medium requires a junk photo or more and it’s one reason I rarely bother to follow a link to a Medium post.
BTW this comment took longer than ten seconds to write.
[+] [-] tejohnso|3 years ago|reply
Can't I do both? I'm pretty sure I can, because that's what I do.
"You can read an article that is at least somewhat cohesive and informative, or you can read countless opinions that often do not add anything to your knowledge."
Again, I'm pretty sure I can do both. And opinions in comments often do add something valuable. That's why I continue to read them.
"You can choose to read a piece of article that took 1 hour to write by one person, or read the comments made by 360 people who took 10 seconds to write their opinion about the article. In the end, you end up consuming the same 3600 man-seconds. The difference is that the article author went through the steps I mentioned earlier to give a better experience about his content, and the commenters did not."
Three different paragraphs all to say the same thing. The article should be more useful, so you should read that instead of the comments, which are almost certainly not useful.
I guess my experience is not at all similar. Most of the time I find the comments more useful than the article. The article in question is no exception. The entire thing can be summarized in one "ten second" comment with nothing useful added by reading the full article.
[+] [-] ItsMonkk|3 years ago|reply
It's not the time it takes to write the comment, it's the time it takes to accumulate the knowledge. With the comments you are consuming way more than 3600 man-seconds. I'll take the comments most of the time.
[+] [-] browningstreet|3 years ago|reply
I still get a lot of value from HN, but possibly more from the submissions than the comments. Sometimes there's gold in the comments, but it's questionable if the signal/noise ratio, and the time to dig for it, is worth the effort.
[+] [-] longrod|3 years ago|reply
The fact that people come out and take time to share their own experience is very valuable. There are not many places like HN. Most of the rest of the internet is filled with trolls, maybe that's what people prefer?
I don't get your signal/noise ratio statement. Comments are not only for you. They aren't a blog post. They are opinions, thoughts, experiences, of a lot of people. You can't apply such a thing as signal/noise because what to you seems as noise might be very valuable for someone else.
[+] [-] PebblesRox|3 years ago|reply
Plus any reply that's not the top reply is not shown adjacent to the comment it's replying to, which can make the discussion hard to follow. (Not sure there's a solution to this since we read linearly but a group discussion like this does not have a linear structure.)
I still read and enjoy the comments but it's a "choppy" experience in terms of context and that can leave me feeling dissatisfied when ideas don't have a chance to develop or really go somewhere.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|3 years ago|reply
I wrote a blog so I could put it on job applications.
[+] [-] PebblesRox|3 years ago|reply
The fact that someone has put more effort into a blog post doesn't necessarily translate into more value for me, the reader.
[+] [-] _ktx2|3 years ago|reply
Edit: Actually, just filtering for their website: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=medium.com/parttimebe... This post is the highest comment count and point count that the author has ever received.
I found an Ask HN with 6 comments and one that the author objected to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32242160
There's an article on Electron terminal apps (and Microsoft Terminal?) that got some corrections/objections, but nothing obtuse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360227
One article sparked a lively discussion on the security of python -m when the author advocated its use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156581 (this one was just their submission, not their story)
and the author has asked for personal/career advice, to which I saw nothing obtuse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32130535
I'm not sure what comments the author is talking about that are "hateful". People on HN can be a bit "difficult" at times, especially if perspectives or experiences diverge significantly. In general, I'll give this advice: When I post, I read the comments but don't engage. Engaging is unhealthy for me and it detracts from the current state of what I wrote (I am the kind of person that will go change my blog posts over time). For others the rule is "Don't read the comments". Personally, I think the author falls in the latter category - and that's not to say anything bad of it, it's just the way some folks are.
[+] [-] Finnucane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unethical_ban|3 years ago|reply
I imagine a meatspace analogue where a presenter works for a period of time on a slide deck and a presentation, only for most people who come to stand in the back and chatter - or at best, for many people after the presentation, to be discussing things entirely beside the point you made. "Why are they caring more about their own chat instead of my insights?"
I get it, but that's the rub. And as someone said, HN strictly speaking has no obligation to be any site's commenting system. Install and manage your own, use a 3P tool, or even manage your own personal subreddit if you feel like it.
---
Off-topic, regarding HN comments: I believe Slashdot to this day has the most useful and effective balance of "free speech" and of quality control of any forum on the Internet. It doesn't require oligarchic mods to filter out undesirable or rash comments; the community does it just fine. Rationale for the comment's value is put in a few buckets such as funny, troll, low effor, insightful, and so on.
Having a metamod system, reducing the number of dead/shadowban comments, and a few minor UI tweaks would be amazing for this site IMO.
[+] [-] giantrobot|3 years ago|reply
Slashdot didn't really ever fall prey to the sort of manipulation that destroyed Digg or has made Reddit's major subreddits a cesspool. HN seems to skirt by on being slightly more niche and dang's tireless moderation efforts.
[+] [-] tinco|3 years ago|reply
When you're using the minus button you'll go through all sorts of thoughts and responses. Sure, if you're easily offended by dumb reactionary comments, then you'll often find a couple at the top. That might hurt your ego, but if you just let it go, hit downvote, and then the minus button, it can be out of sight out of mind in an instant. You'll get to the good parts of the comments soon enough. Those comments might not have been worked on for hours or days or weeks, but the authors might have deep knowledge regardless. And if not deep knowledge, different perspectives stemming from different backgrounds, circumstances and personalities.
I usually read the comments first, and depending on the topic and how engaging the comments are to the topic I might read the article. In the example post of the news of Elon's bid on Twitter, no way that I'll read the article, no way that Bloomberg put any deep thought in their article, and guaranteed that there's people on HN with way more interesting perspectives than that can be stamped out in the couple minutes an overworked tech journalist has to make sure their article attains maximum reach.
This comment took more than 10 seconds to write, and many comments on HN did. I'd just as much enjoy 36 hundred second comments, as I would a one hour article.
[+] [-] thenerdhead|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mceachen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PebblesRox|3 years ago|reply
Public service announcement: you can sign up to HN Replies (created by dang) to get an email notifications whenever someone replies to one of your HN comments. I only found out about this recently and I really like it!
https://www.hnreplies.com/
[+] [-] Tomte|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennedywm|3 years ago|reply
I didn't read this article.
[+] [-] lapcat|3 years ago|reply
Of course HN commenters don't always follow the guidelines with each other either, but it's at least an aspiration, and the moderators will step in if there are major violations. But there seems to be no such protection for article authors.
I've found that the best way to keep HN commenters from becoming too dismissive and/or vicious is to step in and reply myself to comments on my articles. It shouldn't have to be that way, but that's the way it is now.
[Edit] Example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32401086
[+] [-] dang|3 years ago|reply
I do think you're right that there's an tendency to be harsher on authors, though—because it feels like they're not "in the room". It's like gossip: we're all looser-lipped when someone's not around. That would explain your observation that the comments change once you show up as a commenter in the thread about your article. Gossip mutes itself when the person being gossiped about walks in.
The trouble, of course, is that on the internet this is an illusion. The author is "in the room", or soon will be after they track the referring URL of all the traffic. Then they show up and get to hear all the things people were saying when they "weren't there".
[+] [-] mlsu|3 years ago|reply
- every now and then there is a fantastic tweet
- many of them are bad
- there's a lot of them, more than you could ever read
- they are all consistent: you're used to the format, the rules are simple to understand
- there are some ads and some ulterior motives, but for the most part, it's just normal people posting
Of course they aren't special! This article is kind of a "category error." No dig at the author with this, seriously. I genuinely think it's a good post, worth sharing (that's why I'm commenting here!). BUT, this article is kind of like:
Why I don't expect my dog to cook me breakfast any more
Breakfast is great. It fills you up, it tastes good, and after you've been sleeping a while you get pretty hungry, a problem that breakfast solves handily. Occasionally, I have had breakfast cooked for me; it is wonderful!
But I have noticed that my dog never cooks me breakfast. This is because it's a dog. It could be because it doesn't share the same love for breakfast that I have. It could be that it does not have opposable thumbs, or perhaps the lack of prefrontal cortex development. Either way, I've noticed that my dog has never ever cooked me breakfast.
For this reason, I've stopped expecting my dog to cook me breakfast. It seems like every time I expect this to happen, it doesn't happen.
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What I have noticed about HN comments is that HN commenters are usually very intelligent people, and they usually comment "for fun." This is in contrast to nearly everywhere else on the internet, where people are either not very bright (so their comments aren't very clever or even fun to read) AND/OR posting comments or articles with the motive to make money. By volume, I'd say most stuff on the internet does not exist "for fun" but rather because it is self-promotional for some reason.
[+] [-] daoist_shaman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nop_slide|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aqwsde|3 years ago|reply