Name It, and They Will Come

A scenario: a show HN post gets ~60 upvotes reasonably quickly and gets to the front page. Inside the post you have ten or so comments, three of which are negative or quasi negative (sometimes merely skeptical, sometimes overtly harsh). Two people really liked it and said so, five comments are mostly off topic. The negative comments are at the top in the thread (posted by members with higher default ranking scores); the positive comments are short on content and are near the bottom of the thread (posted by weaker ranking members).

That setup doesn't seem like it would be great. In fact it's spectacular. The post is going to end up with 100+ upvotes over time and it's getting a wave of traffic to it. It's the huge number of readers that never comment, and or never even sign up for an account, that are by far the most valuable part of the equation. The typical negative/cynical/skeptical comments are mostly meaningless - so long as you actually have a good product. I can't emphasize that enough, I need a far stronger word than meaningless here. You have a chance, with that wave of traffic, to convert people that want to believe in what you're doing - that's where all of your focus must be, those are the people you must not fail.

If it worked any other way in actuality, no product launch on HN would ever succeed. They'd all be buried by skepticism. It's the unseen angelic adopters on HN that matter more than anything else. Focus on delighting them and everything else will flow from it.

My advice on negative comments (unless they're definitely well earned, in which case you better act on them): put them in your mouth and eat them. Negative HN comments are like eating plain rice cakes. In the scheme of life, they're about the least concerning - most benign - things you're going to run into in the list of negatives when trying to build something, launch a product, run a business, and so on. Every other real problem with business or a product/project is drastically harder to push down and digest. At a minimum let the negative HN comments be a gentle introduction to how hard doing something successfully actually is (gentle because, again, negative HN comments are the easiest thing to mentally deal with - among negatives - that you will ever run into).

Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page.

I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen made people - often busy people - spend time to write very thoughtful comments, which could then raise to the top. A positive, self reinforcing loop. Which is getting slowly, but surely, less effective with the years.

I wish there was a simple formula to reproduce the original mechanism. But I'm afraid there is not.

/rant

This week my first public project got 7 git stars. The feeling is fantastic. I don't have homepage or story, but I have a nice diagram :)

The question for me is why I'm releasing this, to feed the ego monster or because I really beleive it's worth it? I hope it's not the first, but not sure, tbh.

To have a focused discussion on Thing X, ask for a focused discussion. The scenario he stated (discussions on the README getting picked up and whitespace preferences being spun into a mini-holy war) is just... it's going to happen unfortunately. But that discussion wasn't one the author initiated for feedback, it was a general comment thread on the repository. If you, as an author, want to spark an intelligent discussion on your product than do just that, present the points you want to debate while allowing some freedom for that noise since it isn't always useless.

Instead of: "Hey HN, I just wrote a badass new streaming protocol" and linking to the github source, specifically mention your concerns about continuing to rely on TCP for video streaming and the buffering lag it induces, link to a blog-ish thing which links to your source but frames a number of questions or doubts you have around your project if you, indeed, are at a loss and want to turn to the internet as a whole to try and solve them.

Basically, as I do in my workplace, refuse to let your discussion/meeting/whatever become a vaguely directed waste of time - set a clear agenda (i.e. a set of specific points in a blog post) to help funnel the discussion toward the useful parts. In the resulting chatter you'll probably get some whitespace criticism (spaces are simply poor manners, #tabs4lyfe) you'll get some chatter about your question (and on HN that'll be floated to the top) and you might get someone who dug behind your question and found that - yea TCP is bad, but if you're going to use UDP you'll need to have some solid check-summing in place which your project currently lacks.

So, you need to direct the discussion, but allow noise, without noise you'll eventually settle the discussion into a local maximum of functionality where everyone is nodding and saying "Yup we did it, it's not a solvable problem but we've clearly come up with the best partial solution."

> Instead of: "Hey HN, I just wrote a badass new streaming protocol" and linking to the github source, specifically mention your concerns about continuing to rely on TCP for video streaming and the buffering lag it induces, link to a blog-ish thing which links to your source but frames a number of questions or doubts you have around your project if you, indeed, are at a loss and want to turn to the internet as a whole to try and solve them.

That sounds exactly like an example of Dan's suggestion to "tell a story."