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Name It, and They Will Come

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Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#91

Post by j7ake »

mikekchar wrote: post #56
danmaz74 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. 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…

There once was a model railway enthusiast. He loved trains and knew just about everything about them. He had a wonderful collection of model trains. One day he met someone with the same love of model railways. Together they built complex simulations and had their trains running together. They wrote software that could schedule the trains, etc, etc. A few more people noticed and while most people said, "Wow. These guy…

Great analogy thanks for sharing.

I guess one way to handle this is to subdivide the field so there is a hierarchical structure and you can zoom into subfields to capture the the heterogeneous interests of a large body people?

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#92

Post by jondubois »

>> Usually, you feel like you’re creating something. But this time, it feels like you are discovering something as if it already existed.

I can relate to this.

>> It’s not that people didn’t like the project. You know it has tradeoffs and expected people to talk about them. But that’s not what happened.

>> Instead, the comments are largely irrelevant to your idea.

I can't relate to this part. I authored a somewhat popular open source server/framework project (over 5k stars on GitHub now) and my main problem for years was that there weren't enough people using or commenting on it.

The few people who were commenting on it over the years were consistently and exclusively giving positive feedback. Someone even wrote their master degree thesis about my project's scalability and performance. Developers started writing many clients libraries for it (there are now clients in pretty much every major language including more obscure ones such as Unity and one is currently being written for Unreal Engine).

For 5 years, I was constantly searching for criticisms and problems to justify why my project wasn't more popular (so that I could fix the problems) but nobody offered any criticism. Instead people kept telling me that the project was underrated and deserved more attention.

It's pretty heavily used now; it gets a lot of downloads on npm, for some reason, it just got steady linear growth and still it doesn't get talked about much. Now I'm thinking that maybe the problem is simply that I'm not active on Twitter.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#94

Post by wallace_f »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #66
mikekchar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There once was a model railway enthusiast. He loved trains and knew just about everything about them. He had a wonderful collection of model trains. One day he met someone with the same love of model railways. Together they built complex simulations and had their trains running together. They wrote software that could schedule the trains, etc, etc. A few more people noticed and while most people said, "Wow. These guy…

This is a fantastic way of describing the CS "culture" of my school. So many people who like talking about tech without ever bothering to learn the actual underlying skills. And yet they're nominally CS majors...

And he didnt even start to talk about the people showing up because it became lucrative.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#95

Post by lbj »

Its relevant, its concrete, I agree with everything he said. But mostly I just got caught up in his writing-style which is incredibly enticing. Well done man!

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#96

Post by harmful_stereo »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #88
Simple_Guy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One man's noise is another man's signal. The reason the internet has more noise than signal is because there are many people, and they don' all want to talk about the same thing as you.

Comment sections are like a bus without addressing. Everyone needs to scan the content of a message and decide if it's for them.

How good would software and ml have to be before you wouldn't really need to have centralized forums? If the content of messages could be sufficiently indexed automatically- not in the sense of keyword searches but in the vein of actual comprehension- surely there are ways of doing that without anything that far from what currently exists. I don't think it would require skynet.

As someone who has only ever succeeded in bringing down the level of every discussion i have ever been in and never in contributing anything useful, it would be very helpful if i could just be automatically directed to the appropriate content sewer by posting my thoughts directly into a search engine that could dump them in the most suitable location.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#97

Post by nurettin »

petercooper wrote: post #59
stonogo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sort of minimalist looking webpage using a big round font for the headers really does make it hard to absorb the gist of the post - sorry, have I overreacted? I agree, but fortunately for us the people who adopt this weird presentation format almost universally write in a very specific style. I find it easier to just read the headers (or, if they're really bad writers, the headers plus the sentences they felt…

I'm trying to figure out what both you and the grandparent poster are getting at. Usually on HN we're criticizing people for having too much crap on their pages, hard to decipher designs, tiny text, and what not.. not that their pages are clean and minimalist. What's "weird" about a clean page that's mostly text?

It was bikeshedding. Possibly meant as irony.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#98

Post by BenoitP »

danmaz74 wrote: post #43
coldtea wrote: post #16

Even 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…

The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. 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…

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

I've been toying with this idea. My go to would be to do a pagerank on the vote graph. The intrinsic quality of a webpage was transitive enough to make Google win the search engine war; surely people can be viewed as websites that have links indicating quality to other commenters: HN accounts and votes to someone else's comments.

If only HN could release the vote/down dataset...

That could be a privacy violation. Maybe they could do it themselves, or try to disclose it to select trustworthy parties.

Maybe they're doing it internally and they're keeping it to themselves. After all, YC is in the business of detecting precisely individuals that are capable of articulating high quality ideas.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#99

Post by ratsimihah »

I feel like it doesn't apply to just software projects, but it's a phenomenon that affects life more generally.

It's so much easier to bring our focus on and talk about what we understand that we might just dismiss what's truly important but requires effortful thinking.

    Universal shared experiences are easy to talk about. That includes topics like code formatting, verbosity vs magic, configuration vs convention, differences in the community cultures, scandals, tech interviews, industry gossip, macro trends and design opinions.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#100

Post by lmm »

danmaz74 wrote: post #43
coldtea wrote: post #16

Even 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…

The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. 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…

I feel like there was a real step-change when dang introduced a policy of requiring comments to be more positive (and I think implying people hadn't read the article was banned at the same time)? If you look at old HN comment threads you'll see a lot more caustic replies to wrong/stupid comments, and while superficially cruel I really think that was what kept the quality ratio high.
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