I find this to be spot on. I've frequently seen internal projects in companies called "Data Event System" or "Progam Manipulator" or some other nonsense. Sometimes giving a name to a project will dramatically change the way people talk about it.
Name It, and They Will Come
31–40 of 116 posts
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead comment like people are doing in this thread. (It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give more focused responses).
If that's the case, then it appears that the suggested solution -telling a story- doesn't work...
Telling a story is the only solution that works. You either tell your story, over and over and over again until you can't stand to hear it, or you disappear into the noise. You pound the story home, or your competition will and they'll take up that mind share. There are many ways to tell and disseminate a story, that's the primary variable in successful products, not whether there's a story at all.
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#33Even if you don't understand the point the author is trying to make, this part you should be able to understand perfectly, and I find it a perfectly accurate description of what happens 90% of the time: = = = = The top comment thread picks on the coding style in a README example. It turns into an argument about indentation with over a hundred replies and a brief history of how different programming languages approach…
This quoted section on its own makes it sound like Dan is complaining about all the people who aren't discussing the thing he (the creator of the tool/library/idea) wanted them too. I thought the same thing as I first read this section. But I think it becomes clear that he's not making that complaint, or at the very least, he describes a clear reason why people tend to discuss certain concepts, and offers a way to try to get your concepts discussed.
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, but what does that mean in practice? Almost every project posted on HN already has a name and at least a short description of why it exists or what it's trying to do (often in the title itself). They still get bikeshedded to hell, so obviously the name and story alone aren't enough. I see a ton of posts where people bicker specifically about the name or the story (half the comments are "is this actually an issu…
I honestly think part of this is just Dan's writing style in general. When I read his posts I often get a sense of him wanting to try and explain ideas at a conceptual level and teach people how to think and apply the concepts themselves, rather than provide step by step instructions for anything. I am far from an avid Overreacted reader though, I just read what gets posted here, mostly.
Yep, this is absolutely the case.
As an example, see the "Middleware" tutorial page in the Redux docs [0], which Dan wrote. It walks through the process of "how and why did we end up at the final middleware API?", by demonstrating several "failed" attempts at solving the problem of logging.
The page itself is well-written, and definitely demonstrates Dan's standard teaching style. But, it's also true that it's not obvious from glancing at the page how to _use_ middleware, because that doesn't come until the "failed" attempts.
Another good example is his "Redux tutorial" videos on Egghead [1], where he walks through basically building Redux as the process for teaching how to use it and how it works.
For some people, that teaching style is great. For others, they just want to know _how_ to use something, not necessarily how it _works_ right now.
(We're planning to revamp the Redux docs soon-ish [2], and I do plan to change the contents of that "Middleware" tutorial to be an actual explanation of how to _use_ middleware correctly, and then move the "why does it work this way?" explanation to a different section of the docs.)
[0] https://redux.js.org/advanced/middleware
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#35I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just describes the usual internet bike-shedding ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples ), and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how to do it, or why it would help.
He’s telling a story describing our situation that is hard to directly talk about. David Foster Wallace once said in an interview [1]:
> Let me insert one thing, which I'll bet you've noticed from talking to writers—is that most of the stuff that we think we're writing about in books is very difficult to talk about straight out. You know, question and answer. In some sense, it probably can't be talked about directly, and that's why people make up stories about it.
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#36I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just describes the usual internet bike-shedding ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples ), and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how to do it, or why it would help.
> I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead comment like people are doing in this thread. (It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give more focused responses).
Dan doesn't say this, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, but the point I take away from this isn't that people are lazy and don't want to dive deep on a new idea, but instead that people are not obligated to discuss and give you exactly the type of feedback you want.
Even if your idea makes it to the top of HN, people are completely free to discuss ancillary topics or give feedback on areas you aren't interested in (like the coding style or design of the blog post).
And Dan proposes a solution. The solution isn't to decry the low quality of online discourse, or call people lazy, or use moderators to force people onto specific topics. The solution is to tell a story that people are interested in.
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#37This is very accurate as of my recent experience on doing a Show HN here[1][2]. I did get very good feedback but many of the comments were just stupid. Still, posting here did help the project as the broader audience doesn't care about a random's HN opinion.
1. https://zeroserver.io/ 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#38I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. Most of it just describes the usual internet bike-shedding ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples ), and then says that you could have avoided it by just... telling a story or naming something, but doesn't elaborate at all on what it means by that, how to do it, or why it would help.
It says that when the sage points to the moon, the fool looks at the finger. Or, at least, this is how the author feels.
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#39I would love for my project to get on the home page and be filled up with irrelevant comments. Normally anything I try to share is completely ignored.
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#40This is very accurate as of my recent experience on doing a Show HN here[1][2]. I did get very good feedback but many of the comments were just stupid. Still, posting here did help the project as the broader audience doesn't care about a random's HN opinion. 1. https://zeroserver.io/ 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254828
Weird, I actually thought of your Show HN post while reading this. I think this was because the response on HN seemed very negative, but then I saw the project was trending on Github for days after the HN post.